


The course of human things

by eldritcher



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - Ian Fleming
Genre: Adult Content, Canon-Typical Violence, Love, M/M, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:20:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 59,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24617458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: In which none of them are who they once were, in which villains and lovers come and go, and in which the tides return flotsam to the shore.[A mid-life crisis tale in five parts]
Relationships: James Bond/M | Gareth Mallory
Comments: 73
Kudos: 72





	1. Break, break, break

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Sex for barter, sex for fun, explosions and violence. 
> 
> Notes: This was written for a March COVID-19 solicitation. Posted the raw version here now as a fandom gift with the requester's approval. I hope it offers you distraction and reading pleasure. Stay safe!

James had thought little of him. Mallory was merely another of those career bureaucrats, kissing arse to wiggle his way up - James had no patience for the lot. What did they know of the crimes that kept their country safe? Each of them came in, with ideals of reformation, believing truly that they were the chosen ones to usher the enforcers who spoke in violence to become shepherds. 

Then M had him shot, and he had wandered broken and betrayed, and he had still come back, begging for scraps, when he realized that she needed him, that he could be _used_ for one final task. He did not pretend there would be an after. She needed him to die for her, to save her from Silva. He wanted to. He was old and broken, and he knew he would fare poorly in the scraps of assignments she threw his way in pity. No, she knew that he wanted to die for her. And here was his chance. 

He did not know her well, he realized, as she died in his arms. 

Kincade hefted his rifle onto his shoulder and took a defensive stand as they heard a helicopter overhead. James knew he had made many mistakes that night, that week, that month, that year. And here was another come to haunt him - he would not be able to take her body to bury her beside her husband. He had not disposed of the entirety of Silva's henchmen. There must have been a contingent in the vanguard. 

He looked at the dead woman in his arms and bit his cheeks so as not to weep. 

Kincade's shot rang wide. James did not look up. Let him be shot in the back, as he had done to Silva. 

There was a woman's footsteps then, light and non-lethal, and Eve was beside him, kneeling, weeping, mourning. When she looked up at him, there was betrayal in her eyes. 

"You killed her." 

Eve's voice caught on the syllables, and her fingers were shaking as she tried taking M's pulse in vain, but in her eyes James saw the same verdict he had handed himself.

"We came too late," said another voice. Mallory.

James looked up. Mallory was exhausted. The clamminess of his face testified to how he stood upright only under the influence of medication. His bandages were bleeding through and his sling was twisted. He had ridden a helicopter into a Scottish storm, mere hours after he had been shot. 

Behind him stood Tanner, stricken. James did not have the courage to meet Tanner's gaze. 

"Bill, if you could aid Miss Moneypenny?" Mallory barked orders, even if his voice was a wisp. 

"A stretcher, please," he continued, into his earpiece. More MI6 personnel streamed into the chapel. Their faces betrayed no grief as they took M from James's arms onto a stretcher (a _bier_ , James thought hysterically). 

Tanner had pulled himself together. He avoided James's gaze just as James avoided his, and gently helped Eve up. 

James remained where he was, kneeling in blood, by Silva's corpse. He dimly registered Tanner and Eve leaving the chapel, he heard the voices outside as they coordinated moving M's body ( _corpse_ ) onto the helicopter. He heard Mallory speaking to Kincade, offering reassurances and sympathy as considerately and calmly as he would have to any politician. 

The streams of M's blood and Silva's blood had turned one, and James knelt in the dull pool of his hubris. She had loved Silva. How had he not seen it? She had been willing to die. Silva had been unable to kill her. 

Silva had been right, all along, when he had told James that they were the same. Take the shot, she had told Eve. Let him die, she had told Silva's handlers. If James had been the one sent on Silva's fateful mission, would he have done this to her? Would she have been willing to die for him? 

Would Silva have been able to save her if he had been in James's place? 

Mallory was urging James to return with them. Later, James remembered lashing at him, cruelly, precisely, smashing his arm into Mallory's wounded shoulder, delighting in how pale and stricken Mallory turned. He swayed on his feet, and close to, his breath smelled of tea and cigarettes, and there were tears in his eyes from the agony James had dealt out. 

James heard Kincade's remonstrations, and Mallory pulling himself together to offer courteous excuses on James's behalf. Somehow, and to his dying day James knew he would wonder how, Mallory managed to drag James back to the helicopter. 

Helicopters. There were two. He had not even noticed. Sloppy in his old age.

One was steadily gaining height. Mallory pressed James towards the other that waited for them. Only a pilot - how foolish, James thought, and he wanted to scream at Mallory for his carelessness. Instead, he settled for leaping in and hauling Mallory into the vessel, none too gently, relishing in the pained breaths. 

Mallory was in agony. Mallory was alive. James found himself grateful, even as he loathed the man for being alive when M was not, even as he loathed the man for coming to their rescue too late. As the vessel gained height, following its sister through the storm, James watched the fiery crater of Skyfall below, and Kincade stood a lone sentinel on the ground. 

Blood. Mallory was bleeding freely through his coat, as he lurched forward, his hands trembling as he sought to fasten the seatbelt. 

James could easily cripple the pilot, send the helicopter swirling down into the inferno below. James did not deserve to live. The pilot was nobody he knew. 

And yet there was Mallory, who had been reckless enough to get into a helicopter with a man who had lost everything, who had been wounded by him, and still had not drawn a gun on him. 

When James held him steady and fastened the seatbelt for him, Mallory remained quiet but for his rattled breathing. A broken rib, James could tell. The rib must have been taped. And then James had jolted it again when he had hit Mallory in the chapel. 

He wanted to yell at the man for the sheer folly. The fires below held his tongue - he had killed her with his hubris. What right had he to castigate another man? 

James had nothing to say. Mallory was silenced by his injuries. When the helicopter yawed and pitched through the storm, Mallory flinched each time his chest or shoulder moved, and his fingers were clenched white on his knees. James dug through his jeans, until he found the watertight packet of painkillers that he had gotten into the habit of carrying after Eve had shot him. Mallory did not protest when James forced his mouth open and shoved three of the pills in. 

James knew the scale of Mallory's folly when he noted how little the painkillers alleviated the man. He must have drugged himself to the gills with the strongest painkillers from the medics at MI6 before he had even left London, then. 

They had a stretcher readied for Mallory at the landing pad. Tanner and Eve must have known the state he had been in, James realized. James dumped the shaking man onto the stretcher and watched the medics ferry him away. It was the second body he had carried in his arms that night, and he cried because it had not been a corpse. 

\----- 

They buried her beside her husband, with full ceremonial honours. 

He had Mallory to thank for that. Mallory had fetched her corpse and the mongrel dog she had left behind. Mallory had fought from his hospital bed, lucid even if in pain, to allow her to be interred with the honours that were her due. 

James watched Eve fuss over Mallory, who had decided to attend the funeral though he seemed to have considerable difficulty standing. 

Tanner and Q, and the other agents he knew, and many MI6 aides and staff, were watching Mallory with gratitude, with concern, and with something approaching _respect_ as they saw him stubbornly carry on, even if propped discreetly by Tanner's arm at his elbow. 

And in a flash of realization, James knew why the politicians had sent Mallory to the MI6. Mallory, the bastards must have known, had the tenacity to match the woman they were burying. 

Mallory read the eulogy. His glance shifted across the bier, to where James stood alone at the periphery of the mourners, and he cleared his throat before reading what she had selected. 

Tennyson. Her husband's Tennyson. 

_Break, break, break_  
_At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!_  
_But the tender grace of a day that is dead_  
_Will never come back to me._

Silva's corpse had not been retrieved for burial. Mallory had ordered the Skyfall site burned to the ground and leveled. In a season's turn or two, there would be moss and quicksand where James had buried his parents both. She had, in the end, taken even their graves from him.  
  
They lowered the coffin into the ground. James walked away from the woman who had broken Silva and him both.

\-----

Tanner and Moneypenny intervened when James was admitted to A&E to have his stomach pumped. Alcohol poisoning was an old friend, but as vicious as any of the women he had loved and killed. 

M had been his emergency contact. The hospital must have tried to contact her, before contacting Mallory, who had then sent Tanner. 

"It won't bring her back," Tanner said, stiltedly, uncomfortable as he was outside the form of professional interactions.

"You sent her to Skyfall," James replied, tired to his bones. "I killed her, but you sent her there with me."

"Bond-"

"No cleaners yet?" James wondered, disinterested in the answer. It was standard procedure, as M had defended herself often enough for what she had done to him. It was standard procedure to get rid of agents that knew too much of MI6's failures. Silva had been a failure. It was standard procedure to get rid of agents that could not be salvaged. James could not be salvaged. 

Tanner hesitated, before replying, "There will be no inquiry. Mallory spoke for you." 

Tanner had worshipped the ground M had walked on. James wondered how he could, again and again, go to the politicians and plead with them to leave Mallory in charge. 

"M was the old. We need someone new, someone who carries us to this world you want us to shift to, from the shadows she kept us in," Tanner had told the politicians in court, as if M had been one of those bitches who chose what they chose because she had a chip on her shoulder. 

Eve had said the same, when asked to testify. She had been able to blame M easier than she had been able to shoot James. 

"Betrayal is coming easier to you each time," James had told her bitterly. 

"She taught me first," Eve replied, no less bitter than he was. 

_Take the shot_ , she had told Eve. Eve had retired to be Mallory's secretary, all dreams of being an agent cast aside after that bullet had sent him cascading into the river. 

\----   
  
Eve was meant to drive him to his flat from the hospital. She drove him to Kensington instead and left him before a terraced house. 

"Don't," she said tersely when he made to walk away. "You owe me." 

What did he owe her? 

He followed her. The guards scanned them and let them in. James noticed the cameras tracking them. Q had wasted no time in outfitting the place with his toys. 

Inside, Mallory sat in one of the two chairs by the fireplace, his eyes sharp as he watched them approach. James realized he had not seen the man idle before. 

"Thank you, Miss Moneypenny," he said politely. He shifted as if to rise to greet her. 

Eve rolled her eyes and said tartly, "Chivalry from the walking wounded is not required as part of my employment contract, sir."

James raised his brows at how Mallory smiled in response, bashful and apologetic. Eve paid no notice. This must have been nothing new in their interactions. She pushed James into the chair across Mallory, poured them both tea, and took her leave. 

Her Chanel perfume lingered. James had gifted it to her when she had fretted so after he had returned, resurrected, to put her out of her misery and guilt. She wore it still. He had forgiven her for taking the shot. Could she one day forgive him for killing M? 

Mallory was watching him quietly. 

"I don't know what I am here for," James said. 

He wanted to be angry. He want to lash out at Mallory. He could easily kill the man _twice_ by the time the guards could rush in. 

Mallory picked up the television remote from the coffee table between them and switched the device on. M came alive on the screen, demanding. _Break, break, break_ , she ordered, telling James to walk the earth and kill for her, as he had done for the last twenty years. 

She died again, when James seized the remote from Mallory's unresisting hands and threw it at the television. 

"Will you?" Mallory asked quietly. 

_Break, break, break_ , Mallory had read her eulogy at the service, clad in black as Eve held an umbrella aloft over him, as Tanner steadied him discreetly.

James had then been foolish enough to believe that she had finished the unmaking of him. She was a tenacious bitch. Silva had been unable to kill her in the end, even if she had deserved it. 

He shifted his gaze from the ruined television to Mallory. The man remained still, his gaze unwavering on James. With a grunt, James moved to the display cabinets of liquor above the sideboard, only to find the fragile glass doors locked. 

"You can give me the code or I can smash the panes," he told Mallory, enunciating each word crisply. 

"Do you think I will allow it?" Mallory asked, his tone betraying no emotion. 

"You can barely stand without Tanner playing man-maid," James scoffed, swinging his elbow into the panes and smashing them open. 

A few of the bottles broke. Scotch. Of all the bloody liquors the bastard could have stocked. Scotch - he had been unable to stomach a drop after returning from Skyfall. There had been a distillery there, and James remembered that his Mum had played chase with him through the long halls. M had liked her Scotch. Reminded her of the boy, she had once told him, reeling him as she had once reeled in another broken orphan. 

"I don't need to stand to act," Mallory said, as James watched the scotch drip onto the sideboard, and then onto the rich oriental carpets. 

The bastard had known James would go for the alcohol. He had known more; he had known that James would be left reeling, unmoored, among broken glasses of M's favorite tipple. Fucking Eve. Fucking Tanner. Fucking Q. Traitors. They had sold him out to Mallory. 

"You don't need to take her mission, Bond."

"There is nothing left," James spat. He was a broken relic of her era. He had failed to die for her once. He could, with her last demand. "It will spare the lot of you from sending the cleaners." 

"There will be no cleaners, Bond, not for refusing this."

"Refuse her?" James laughed, turning to face the idiot who pretended to know him, to know her, to know what they were to each other. 

"You have covered for her mistakes more than was her due," Mallory stated, as if those words were not a noose around his slender neck, and there was genuine surprise on his features when James wrapped his hands about him to shake him violently. 

"I am not unprepared to act," Mallory said, choking, and lifted his gun in warning like the idiot he was. James knocked the revolver away, and pushed him back into his chair, taking care not to rip open his wounds again. 

"You are wholly unprepared," James informed him flatly, wondering why Mallory strove to fight him off, reckless of his injuries. He shifted his hands away from Mallory's neck to his arms, easing him still. "Stay put, you obstinate arse! Eve will have my head if I send you to the hospital tonight."

Mallory's eyes were blazing in conviction as he opened his mouth to no doubt say something pithy and profound. The sheer absurdity of it all shook James - there he stood, in Mallory's sitting room, watching a great deal of goddamned scotch drip onto Mallory's expensive Turkish rugs, watching Mallory trying to be clever and helpful, while Eve's perfume lingered still. M was dead, and Silva had been right. 

"Why are you smiling?" Mallory asked, thrown off his argument by the expression on James's face. He then had the gall to gently bring his palms to flick off James's hold on his arms, in more delicate dudgeon than M had ever been capable of. 

"There is no passing that psychological evaluation now, is there?" James muttered. 

"I daresay you will have to lie through your teeth," Mallory agreed genially. "You don't have to take this mission, you know. You needn't let her squeeze blood from stone." 

She took the orphans because nobody cared when she squeezed blood from stone. That had saved their country, many times over. How dare Mallory sit there and judge her? 

"You have a death wish," James settled for saying, sinking into the chair he had abandoned. 

Choking Mallory again, hitting Mallory again, would serve nothing, would certainly not wear down Mallory's obstinacy any. Little wonder the IRA had finally tired of him and discarded him out in the fields for the dogs and the vultures. Mallory had not done them even the decency of expiring then. He had crawled his way back to civilization and lived to be a pain in James's arse. 

"Another agent could do this." 

There were no other agents that she could have demanded this of. The rest of them had been merely her subordinates. James had been _hers_ , just as Silva had been. Hers to use, hers to discard, hers to expend. 

"Who said that this will be my first time?" He had asked Silva boldly. There had been knowing in Silva's gaze then. M had trained them both to withstand atrocities for the sake of Queen and Country that the other agents were not expected to outlast. Two rats that outlived the others.

 _Don't cock it up_ , Mallory had told James at their first meeting. When James had cocked it up, Mallory had come to salvage him from the ruins, and dragged him back to London from Skyfall. When James had tried to kill himself with alcohol, Mallory had intervened again. When they had sensibly wanted to send the cleaners to mop up the mess M had left, Mallory had shielded James from the committees. There he sat now, well-intentioned and foolish, as he tried to talk James out of what he knew he could not talk James out of. Mallory was dressed in shirtsleeves and plain grey trousers, with his arm in a sling, with his ribs taped tight, and he looked up at James without an iota of fear. He was so bloody pleased with himself, James could tell, for his little stunt with the Scotch. 

Silva would not have been the first. He would have been the second. The first one had been forgettable, a test to check off in M's training regimen for her soldier. 

Mallory did not have M's guts. He did not have Silva's understanding of James. He did not have Vesper's ruthlessness. He would not last at MI6. 

When James kissed him, fiercely, full of anger and despair, Mallory startled and jerked away. Figured, James thought ironically, that the man would be scared of a kiss than he was of a madman with a gun or an agent broken by grief. 

"I am flattered," Mallory said, stumbling over his words, though he did not look flattered at all. "No, thank you, Bond." 

James stepped back. Mallory was not married. Maybe he had a mistress stowed away somewhere. Yet- Mallory's body language was of surprise, not of revulsion. 

"I am going to finish what she wanted," James informed him. 

"They asked me to stay for the interregnum." 

"Joy." 

"I didn't want it."

That was not a lie. James found that he was not spitting in rage. Mallory would strive to do the job to the utmost of his capability, regardless of how poorly suited he was for it, regardless of how little he wanted it. 

Mallory's gaze was on his lips. When he noticed James watching him, he colored and shifted his eyes to the fireplace. 

"Shall we celebrate our reluctant camaraderie?" 

The reply was a censorious glare. James knelt before him, having no qualms. He had not attempted cocksucking before. His test during his training had been more along the lines of skullfucking, with little participation required. How hard could it be to suck cock? He placed his left palm on Mallory's right thigh and used his right to cup the man's groin. There was no stirring of interest. The pulse there was frantic, and when he looked up, he saw discomfort edging to fear. 

"You can refuse, you know. Blood from stone, and all that," James mocked him gently, wondering if it was the principle of the thing that held Mallory back. 

Mallory took a deep breath, exhaled a sigh, and said, "Not like this. Help me upstairs to my bedroom, if you will." 

\---

Mallory's bedroom was a hedonistic paradise. There were oils and watercolors on his walls. The carpets were Turkish and soft. His sheets were raw silk. M's bedroom, the one she shared with her late husband, had been spartan. 

James went to sit at the edge of the bed, following Mallory's nudge. Mallory remained standing before him. 

"Like this?" He asked, curious about Mallory's preferences, looping his arms easy about the man's waist and tugging him close. 

Mallory slapped his hands away, none too gentle, and lowered himself to his knees before James. _That_ had been unexpected. 

"You can refuse," James reminded him, worried, when Mallory set about unbuttoning him with all the alacrity of a man who must complete a chore. 

Mallory's mouth was warm. James had been blown by many beautiful women. Some of them had been good at sucking cock. Others had been mediocre. Mallory was dismal at it. He was easily spooked when he felt James's cock growing on his tongue and he made a sawing motion as he attempted to take more in, succeeding only as far as getting three inches into his mouth. He jerked when he felt James's cock on his palate, and his teeth grazed accidentally. He did not have the presence of mind to bring his fingers to fondle and assist. 

James was harder than he had been in recent memory, wanting this pisspoor blowjob, wanting Mallory's honesty and willingness and effort in seeing him pleased and sated. James placed his hands over Mallory's death grip on his thighs and gently unfurled them open. Mallory's breath hitched when James traced lazy circles and lines up and down his wrist and forearm. Mallory's eyes shot open in shock when James brought a hand to gently cup the back of his head. The shaky exhale in response took James in the deepest Mallory had taken him so far and James came violently. He had not touched himself after M's death. Mallory's convulsive swallowing did not aid anything; his face was a gleaming mess and the front of his shirt was wet with spit and come. 

"What do you want?" James asked, breathless, mellowed, wanting to please. Mallory shook his head, smiling; it was the same bashful smile he had given Eve when she had told him off for his silly notions of chivalry. 

Vesper had made a funny face when he had come in her cunt without a condom for the first time. It had been unlike her usual sophistication and grace that it had touched something deep in him. 

He pulled Mallory up. The man came easily enough. James tugged them until they were underneath the blankets. He found the light switch by the headboard and the room was left in the dark. Gently, trying not to spook Mallory, he shifted and licked away the spend from Mallory's face and chin and collarbone. Mallory squirmed but did not push him away. James traced a palm down Mallory's neck, down his chest, to his groin, and found no evidence of interest.

"I can explain," Mallory said quickly. "I haven't slept with a man before."

James had learned the art of pointed silences from M. Mallory shifted restlessly and then continued, "I haven't slept with anyone in a while."

Medications? No. Mallory's pulse and heartbeat were steady. Then James realized what it must be. 

"I am not traumatized," Mallory protested.

He was not lying, James knew. It had not triggered any symptoms of PTSD. James had lost himself to passion in Mallory's grasp, but he had not lost himself to the extent of failing to observe his partner's reactions. 

Sexual assault was not part of the IRA's modus operandi. 

"They did nothing inappropriate," Mallory spoke up. Non-sexual torture and kidnapping, in his view, must have been an appropriate reaction. "They were violent and systematic, and my body bears the scars, and I haven't found it palatable to engage in intimacy afterwards. We are not all fortunate enough to remain handsome after a stint or two under a torturer's care."  
  
"Did you want this?" 

"Yes. Nerves," Mallory said laconically, and yawned, and turned his head into James's shoulder as if that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "I will get used to it."

He expected more events of this nature to occur. James wondered if Mallory meant it as a general statement of facts or if he expected more events of this nature to occur with _James_. 

"Bond? It will distract you from the alcohol withdrawal, you know."

"I look forward to it," James said, tired of Mallory and his fucking inability to make demands, of how he voiced everything as a question instead of an order. James did not want choice. He had spent four decades on earth without choice and knew nothing else. 

Mallory fell asleep easily. James stayed awake all night and thought of Vesper. He stayed awake and forced himself not to think of M. He stayed awake and held a sleeping man in his arms to make sure that Mallory did not worsen his injuries by restless shifting and turning. 

_Break, break, break_. Everyone else had. What would MI6 leave of Mallory? 

James stayed awake and willed himself to forget what a glass of brandy could do for him. 

\---- 

James had watched many lovers wake in his arms. Mallory reminded him of Vesper, in how he woke silently, eyes closed, until he took a deep breath to ground himself in the present. 

"You did not think this through," James told him, fingering the buttons of his crinkled shirt that sat firm at his collar. 

Mallory had a bright quirk to his lips as he replied in a voice hoarse from sleep, "You have not had a drop to drink in nine hours. My lack of strategic thinking has served you well, hasn't it?"

"Fancy yourself as a serial fixer of all the broken scraps she left behind, do you now?" James asked, and the raging bitterness in his tone surprised even him. Mallory's eyes were wide in dismay, but he did not refute a word. He was not a liar. 

"Do you know what I want to stay off the alcohol?"

Mallory shook his head, though there was alert wariness creeping into his eyes, leaving his sleepy goodwill behind. 

"You will let me do what I wish to you." 

_Let me please you_ , James wanted to say, but he bit his tongue on the words. Vesper had pretended to let him, and Vesper was dead. L _et me see you, let me watch over you...trust me to keep you safe_. He did not dare say a word of that. M had grudgingly trusted him to watch over her, when she had run out of lifelines. 

James was no protector. He could not give. He knew only to take. What would it serve to pretend otherwise? 

"It will keep me off the bottle. Isn't that what you wanted?" James asked Mallory, mocking him, freed of the obligation to protect, cutting off his desperate need to care.

Mallory would not say yes. Mallory's limbs were trembling in James's hold, despite the tight control he had over his facial features. 

He swallowed once, looked away, before frowning and forcing himself to meet James's sardonic gaze. "You will not take her mission."

Well-played. Mallory was no poor negotiator. He knew too, as James did, the lines that could not be crossed. There was now a dare in Mallory's gaze, and the bright quirk had returned to his lips. 

Fuck it. James had been defeated everywhere else. He refused to lose here. 

"Yes," James said, and kissed the surprise swift off his tenacious opponent's lips. "We have a deal, Mr. Mallory." 

Mallory did not seem pleased by James's acquiescence, by the deal that bound him. His smile had withered away and there was solemnity in his face. James refused to think of how Vesper had looked at him at the end of her life, at the broken pieces of him. 

"I suppose you wish me to undress," Mallory bit out, finally looking away. His face was warm when James brushed the back of his hand against a cheek. 

"Now we wouldn't want you exerting yourself, would we? You are a wounded man in recovery, after all. I will gladly see to your clothes."

When James stooped over him, to the floor, where his boots lay, and plucked a knife out of his right boot, Mallory's eyes had more fear than arousal. 

Yet, there was arousal, James told himself, forcing himself to stay the course. He wanted to seize, he wanted to teach the man a lesson about the lines that must not be crossed, and his heart wanted him to shield the idiot from what awaited him at MI6. Mallory was the only one who had offered James the chance to refuse. James refused to give him quarter. He could not. He wanted to. He bloody wanted to. 

"I won't hurt you," he found himself saying, and delighted stupidly in how Mallory exhaled in relief. Then his heart twisted in his chest at how Mallory smiled weakly and opened his throat in tilt, offering himself to a broken murderer, afraid and yet willing. 

James needed a drink. All he had instead was long, rough laving of the throat beneath him, catching Mallory's nervous shudders and shifting, containing the man in his hold. Mallory's sweat on his tongue was sweet. He smelled of medicines first, and then of himself. The temple of Solomon had smelled of cedar, frankincense, and myrrh, James remembered, from some scripture read to him by a lover long ago. 

His tongue scraped over rough patches of skin, as he explored from throat's hollow to the right, along a collarbone. Burns. Wires. A bullet here. Another bullet. A knife. The IRA had been creative, even if they had not tormented the man in a more intimate manner. In the daylight, what James could see was ugly and mottled. He had had many lovers. None had been so marked by hatred's pen. 

"It won't please you," Mallory said, apologetic, as apologetic as he had been when he had not found the strength to rise to greet Eve as a gentleman should. 

"We have a deal," James told him. Mallory did not reply, though his reluctance was stamped in his clenched fists. 

"Arms out wide." James did not want him pulling at his sling yet again. 

Mallory obeyed. His stuttering breath when James covered him with his body was sweet as he surrendered his will. He watched James with worry and wonder writ large on his face, but spoke not a word of complaint. 

James ran his hands from Mallory's collar to fingertips idly, a few times, until Mallory sunk deeper into the bed in a semblance of relaxation. When he pressed their groins together, Mallory jerked against him in surprise. Though there was no physical response yet, James noted how Mallory's mouth fell open in a gasp and how his hands swiftly came to hold James by the hips.

"Arms out wide," James reminded him. "We don't want to tie you down, do we now?" 

"No, no," Mallory murmured, shocked, as he brought his arms to where James wanted them. Shocked, but not terrified. Curious even. James bit back a grin that threatened to split open his face. 

When James unbuttoned Mallory's shirt, slowly, kissing down his sternum as he proceeded, he counted the heartbeats. Nowhere close to resting rate. Mallory's heart had beat at sixty per minute when James had first shaken his hand in M's presence. It had been at a stuttering eighty when he had collapsed against James on the helicopter. It had been an even fifty when he had been asleep the night before, as he lay calm in James's embrace. It was higher, significantly higher, now. A hundred? James had only begun. 

The scar that ran down the breastbone to navel was a curious one. 

"Axe," Mallory explained helpfully, even as he squirmed under James's shifting lips. "They had to send someone out to the smithy to blunt it, once they settled on the idea." 

"The logistics of creative torture," James muttered, licking a long stripe down the terrible line. Mallory pressed his skin up into James's mouth, unsure and yet demanding. He exhaled sharply when he felt James's smile on his navel. His hands came to James's head when he felt James's nose tracing the descent into his navel. Vesper had giggled whenever James had done that to her. 

Mallory's psychological evaluation, once he had been returned to safety, had seen him retired from his service and shifted to bureaucracy. 

"Arms back where they were," James told him, and shifted open the shirt to lay Mallory's torso bare. 

James could see traces of loveliness, peeking from the spots that remained untouched by torture. Mallory had a nipple on the left still, pink and tightening under James's gaze. On the right, his chest was a patchwork of scars. They had sliced his nipple off. 

James brought his knife, the flat of it, and pressed the cold metal against Mallory's skin, right against where his nipple must have been before they had cut it off. 

Mallory was biting the inside of his cheek, refusing to speak a word of caution. He kept his hands where they were. He met James's gaze without coyness. 

Everyone who knew James knew that he would one day die for a woman. In the autumn daylight, on white silken sheets, James lay atop a man so brave that if he were less broken, he would have pledged fealty vocally again and again at this altar. Instead, he pressed his lips to the blade, kissing Mallory with the blade in between their skin. 

"I am going to cut off your shirt now." 

Mallory nodded and watched him as James deftly used the knife close to fabric that wrapped to skin to part it away in strips discarded. 

"Keep your hands still," James warned him, and bent to suck and lick and lave at Mallory's torso, learning the curves that reached underneath his arms and the musk there, learning how Mallory shifted away ticklish when James dragged his nose through the sparse armpit hairs, learning the notes of Mallory's helpless laugh when James persisted. James tracked down the sides of the ribs, kissing, until he reached Mallory's waist where his trousers clung to his form. 

"How do you usually get off?" James asked, curious, as he pressed a sucking kiss to the Adam's apple thrown into stark projection against Mallory's neck. 

"I-" Mallory needed a moment to gather his senses. James smiled at him, charmed by the loss of composure. Mallory grinned back, tentative, trusting, and James tried his best not to think of Vesper's last breath.

"Tell me. How does a bureaucrat frig himself after a long day of pointless meetings?" 

Mallory's bashfulness was soft, evident in how his eyes crinkled in mortified amusement than any glaring tell. 

"I am not going to be any good at talking dirty to you, you realize?" he rallied, brave even despite how out of his depth he was. James rewarded him with a kiss to the corner of his plucky mouth. 

"You must have sat in that armchair of yours downstairs, while the guards stood outside, while Eve's perfume lingered, knowing that Tanner or Q or someone would visit you any moment, and slowly fisted yourself through your trousers."

A fantasy. Mallory was conscious about his body's scars and deformations. James thought it unlikely the man tended towards anything more involved that requiring touching himself or looking at himself than a quick wank under the sheets in the dark of the night. 

Mallory seemed to understand what James was up to, because his smile faded away, leaving uncertainty. _Trust me_ , James implored silently. _I will not break you now, not now_.

"I would, now," Mallory admitted hoarsely, yielding once again though none possessed of a modicum of sense would have offered this to James. "I woke today morning, and wanted to take you in my mouth again. I will think about it later, and..." He cleared his throat, and looked perplexed. "I suppose I would touch myself to that memory. I feel compelled to. Pornography has not helped me before. Active participation seems to be more stimulating as..." He offered his apologetic smile again. "I would _wank_ to the memory of you spilling into my mouth. Is that what you wished to hear?"

"Is that true?"

"Yes," Mallory admitted. 

James found that he had been slowly grinding into Mallory then. It was unlike him to have involuntary reflexes during foreplay. He had not expected this to be easy. 

He knew women. He knew how to be aroused by women. He had not expected his arousal to come organically with a man, especially with a man who was inexperienced. He had expected that he would need to try, to focus, to pinpoint and chase new sensations to titillate and arouse himself. 

"Was it gay pornography?" James asked. 

Mallory seemed to be focused on the slow grind of James's hips against him. James needed to pinch him in the side to bring him to the question. 

"You pose the oddest questions," Mallory said, none too pleased when James forced his hips still. James snapped back a curse when Mallory shifted experimentally to thrust up into him. "Gay, lesbian, straight - does it matter? I was looking for a reliable response. I was not picky about the content." Mallory pushed up into James once again, and looked at him in awe when James could not help but grind back. 

"You want this!" Mallory exclaimed in disbelief, looking at James as nobody but Vesper had before. "You are not trying to prove a point."

"I am proving a point," James assured him, kissing off the epiphanies before Mallory could say a word more. When he came to unbutton Mallory's trousers, there was no hesitation in how Mallory lifted his hips to aid him. 

Mallory's genitals and thighs and legs had not escaped the attention his torso had been subjected to by the IRA. He was comely nevertheless, James found, in how sinew shifted beneath his marred skin, in how his cock lay curved soft to the side, in how neatly trimmed his pubic hair was. James had not touched a cock in want before. 

When his fingers shifted Mallory's cock onto his palm, and felt the heft and texture of the warm skin, he wanted to be given the license to do this once more, twice more, whenever he desired, after Mallory kicked him out of the house. Mallory's abdomen and thighs were clenched in tension. His face was a picture of worry. 

James shifted back on the bed, until his head was level with Mallory's navel, and kissed down a line from stomach to the base of the cock, and then boldly up to the foreskin. He could not resist catching the foreskin between his teeth and gently tugging. 

"James!"

Mallory spoke his name for the first time, and it was not marked by pain. 

James realized he was humping the bed. He noticed that Mallory's cock was hardening. Without ado, he began sucking Mallory off, interspersing his blowjob with how his fingers roved and plucked at Mallory's torso and thighs. Mallory fell apart under him, into cries of want and stuttered demands. 

It took Mallory longer than it would have taken James to get off with a blowjob. Mallory was overwhelmed, and his body knew not how to react. James remained patient, introducing no new stimuli, wanting to bring Mallory off just with this, just with his cock in James's mouth. When he came finally, after a long struggle against his own body's confusion, he came with James's name torn from his lips. James swallowed as best as he could, and then smeared his face over Mallory's sensitized thighs, feeling them shake under his skin. 

"You-" Mallory began, with little lucidity but armed with his customary fairness of spirit. James kissed him quiet, and Mallory's thighs came to bracket him as he tasted himself in James's mouth, cradling James's cock against his spent genitals. Impatient, inspired, James brought a firm hand to his cock, and wanked himself off until he came on Mallory's softening cock and balls. In possessiveness, in tasteless folly, he smeared his spend across Mallory's skin, and brought his hand to Mallory's mouth. 

Mallory's eyes were half-closed in languor as he licked James's hand clean, without coyness, more effective than seductive. He had kept his arms where James had demanded him to place them. His thighs were closed about James's body, keeping James in place over him. 

James kicked the knife away from the bed for good measure and then turned them about, until he rested flat on his back with Mallory scooped close into a relaxed heap in his arms. 

He ran a hand down Mallory's spine, down knots and scars, until it rested on the swell of the man's arse. If it had been a woman in his arms, he would have squeezed a palmful in playfulness. He did not know the etiquette to follow with a male lover. Gay men had connotations of topping and bottoming attached to these gestures, he knew. 

He wanted a drink. More than that, right then, James wanted to know what Mallory would allow to be done to him. 

When Mallory's breathing evened into a doze, James wondered how to make peace with refusing M's last order. 

If Silva and James had their fates reversed, would it have been Silva in Mallory's bed, holding to his chest this warm, brave burden? 

How many women would James need to love and lose before he quelled the desire to yield to Mallory the shards that was left of him, after blood had been wrung from stone? 

Mallory's heart beat as he came in James's mouth had been a hundred and ten. 

\---- 

He must have drifted off, because when he came to, Mallory was bustling about, in a fresh pair of trousers, bare of torso but for a loose towel slung about his shoulders, and he smelled of toothpaste and soap. 

"I set out tea downstairs," Mallory was telling him, as he tried to fasten his watch with his good arm and failed. 

James got to his feet and walked over, and fastened the watch snug on Mallory's wrist. Mallory's smile was bright as he nodded thanks, and he left James there, standing alone in a bedroom where he had made love to a man. 

When James arrived downstairs, dressed in the same clothes as before, with a splitting headache from dehydration and withdrawal, he saw Mallory bustling about the dining table, with tea and tall glasses of what seemed to be lemonade. 

"Eve will not be pleased if you are housekeeping with your injury," James noted, once he had drank down the glass of lemonade. 

"You and I know this is not my first bullet," Mallory said cheerfully from the kitchen, where he was fussing over the stove with tomatoes and eggs and bacon, clumsy of body but confident in mannerisms, and James edged him away to crack eggs open and to fry up a breakfast. 

"Go sit down and drink your tea."

Mallory's eyes skirted to James's lips before he nodded. He had confidence enough to undertake a breakfast he could not prepare one-handed. He did not have the assurance to dare kissing James in the morning. 

"How do you like your eggs?"

"Poached." 

"Kiss me, or your eggs will be scrambled." 

Mallory laughed, delighted, and his eyes sparkled as he leaned in to press a firm kiss to James's mouth. He did not deepen the kiss. James did not coax him. 

He had not made anyone breakfast since Vesper. 

One step at a time. 

When he made his way to the dining table with their breakfasts, Mallory was sipping at his tea, reading two reports at the same time, convincing his Q-programmed device to play Kinks' Waterloo, and all the while the softest joy lingered in his eyes.

"Not a drop yet," James told him. "Keep to your end of the deal and I'll keep to mine." 

Mallory had had the broken scotch bottles and cabinets sorted out by the time James had come down. 

There was that smile again, bashful and pleased, and Mallory said quietly, "It is likely that your explorations will hit a psychological barrier I cannot will myself across."

James doubted it. Mallory had lain open before him that morning, nervous and yet willing. James doubted his own ability to successfully enact penetrative sex (giving or taking), than Mallory's fears about his limitations. 

"We shall have to study gay pornography together."

"I was given to understand you are a man of the world."

"I have fucked more women than you have shaken hands with, I am sure," James said, laughing, and Mallory's glare was weak and mostly for show. 

He sat at the table and watched Mallory scoop up the egg he had poached, daintily. Mallory hummed in pleasure, eyes closing in satisfaction, and nodded his head in thanks for the perfectly poached egg. James had to kiss him again, and that willing mouth under his tasted of yolk.

"No men?" Mallory asked, curious. 

James did not reply. There was no need to. 

"Can I tack on an addendum to our deal?" Mallory wondered then.

"What more could you want?" James had already ceded, even if Mallory could not be told outright. 

"No men...or women, for the duration of our deal."

Mallory could be ruthless too, James discovered then. He was not as authoritarian as M had been, and he did not take silently as Vesper had. He was ruthless nevertheless, in asking boldly even if he was at a disadvantage, even if he knew James would say no. Mallory was ruthless with himself. Had James ever dared ask from such a place of vulnerability and relative disadvantage? 

"Careful, or I will think that you are attached," James said, responding automatically with a taunt as he would have to any femme fatale he had to seduce in his line of work. He regretted the words as soon as he had spoken them. Mallory had not deserved that taunt. 

"That is my proposed addendum," Mallory said easily, returning to his papers and tea and breakfast. "You only need agree or disagree. Mocking me serves neither of us, does it now?"  
  
"Let us negotiate then," James said, striving to return Mallory's bright-eyed glances and clever, pleased smiles. 

"Hmm?" Mallory sipped at his tea, but paid James no attention.

"I have a proposed addendum too. To tack on to the other end of our deal." 

Mallory stilled. Then he asked carefully, "What more could I give you?" 

Vulnerability was obscene. It lured James in, though he hated it in equal measure, because he wanted to shield that part of Mallory which surrendered vulnerabilities so easily to another.

"No more wanking, for the duration of our deal," James laid out his terms, grinning at how Mallory sat up straight and glared at him in remonstrance, and there was a pleased quirk to Mallory's lips that betrayed his happiness at James's willingness to agree to something that both of them knew James had little inclination for. 

"What will I do then? A chap has needs, you know."

The banter had returned. James could have sighed in relief. 

"A chap may bring his needs to me. I serve at your pleasure, now that you have taken away my bottle and my mission from my late master."

"On the lookout for a new master, are you?" Mallory teased, all his grimness of earlier lost.

James thought of his words before he spoke them, and he did not regret it at all for the genuine shock that flitted across Mallory's face. 

"I have a new master, I am afraid. His sanity is questionable, but he has shown his worth." 

"Has he now?" Mallory murmured, aghast and pleased, no doubt thinking that James referred to their activities in bed. 

"Yes," James told him tartly. "He stayed on when he didn't have to, to take care of subordinates who cared not a jot for him, to make sure that the legacy of a woman who hated his guts was preserved. Took a bullet too, and rode a helicopter into a storm to save a thankless agent from himself. As far as masters go, I don't consider myself unlucky."

The last time he had dared be so frank, it had been M's last day on earth, and their barriers both had been destroyed by the ending that neared. Vesper and he had not needed words to know their hearts, or so he had thought once.

What an unbearable sensation it was, to offer his words, to wait for a verdict. 

"I am staying because I am an ambitious bastard," Mallory tried to convince him, unhappy that spies and intelligence agents had sussed out that he had no ulterior motives. Had his silly prattling about his ambitions convinced anyone at all? 

"I am sure. I can't wait to see where this stepping stone takes you," James allowed. 

"I knew, all along, that if James Bond could not cure my sexual dysfunction, then nobody else could," Mallory said earnestly, and fed him a spoonful of egg before James could retort. "Now I can skip up the stairs of power with my newfound prowess."

"We have a way to go before you can impress the Queen with the marvels of your cock."

Fuck it. He flicked Mallory's spoon away from the plate, dunked a slice of toast thoroughly in the egg, and fed his companion. 

\----- 


	2. And Life, a Fury slinging flame

When James returned to his tiny flat, he walked straight past the bottles, to his toilet, and threw up into the bowl. He managed to postpone his emotional crisis long enough to take a long shower, and dress himself in a fresh suit, before taking himself to Eve's. 

"I seduced him," he said, when she opened the door. 

She slapped him. Then she lifted her gun, hands steady.

"Eve," he implored, with no excuses left to offer her. 

She dragged him in, shut the door behind them, and said grimly, "You can tell me what happened, and then I can shoot you."

There was a photo frame of M on her mantel. James looked away. 

"He asked me to stop drinking. He asked me to not take the last mission she wanted me to carry out." Words bled out of him, and he realized he was shaking, crying. Eve watched him cry, silent and merciless. "I was furious, Eve. I-"

"You hit him," she said flatly. "His injuries were aggravated after the trip to Skyfall. You must have lashed out at him then. You lashed out at him again yesterday."

"I stopped myself yesterday, I swear," James said, unable to meet her gaze. "I-" he swallowed, and he realized he had not cried for his mistakes in a long time, before someone living, for someone living. "I hurt him at Skyfall. He did not hold it against me, Eve."

"How would you know?" Eve asked. 

James did not know. How could he even begin to ask, to apologise? 

"I was furious," he confessed. "I wanted to make him suffer. I knew of his past with the IRA. I offered to stop drinking, to stay put and to not go on a revenge mission for her. I wanted him to pay. So I asked him to sleep with me." 

He found himself kneeling by her toilet bowl a few minutes later, retching up his guts, and then bile. When he dragged himself out, back to the sofa where Eve waited, her shoulders were stooped by the burden of his mistakes. 

"Eve, please-" he did not know what to ask for. 

She sighed and shook her head. Tiredly, as if by rote, she said, "Mallory is not a victim, James. He is impossible to coerce. It doesn't change that you are a fucking bastard. He spent four hours convincing the PM not to send the cleaners after you, from his fucking hospital bed, when he ended up there that night you returned him from Skyfall."

"I am grateful," James bit out. He did not want to be grateful. He did not want to indebted. He had been furious when Mallory had spoken to him the night before. Now, he was weary and ridden by guilt. He had tried to break Mallory because the other man had dared to pull him out of his waiting grave. 

"He is not Mansfield, James." Eve had gentled her tone, though admonishment and disappointment were still present in every word. "Pick an overseas assignment and stay away from him. He won't hold it against you."

"I asked him for a continuing engagement." 

There was not even bile when he found himself retching again. Eve's anger had been worn down to pity. 

"Watch where you tread, James," she said quietly. "He is not Mansfield. There won't be a redo, or second chances, if you cross him."   
  
Mallory was milder than M had been, and ruthless when his morals were crossed. James had seen him shoot without remorse. Mallory's sense of morals was starker than M's had been, with little allowance for the grey, for squeezing blood from stone for the sake of a country's welfare. There would have been no Silvas or Bonds reared in MI6's bosom as an expendable rats. 

"I am afraid, Eve," he admitted for the first time. 

He had been afraid even when he had knelt before Mallory, mocking, wanting to cause discomfort and scandal. He had been afraid when undressing Mallory on his silk sheets. 

He had been afraid when Mallory had yielded to his touch and lips. He had been afraid when he had made the man breakfast and bantered with him over tea and toast. 

Eve did not know about Vesper. She knew enough. She knew about M. She knew why James was frightened out of his wits and why he could not walk away.

"Tell him, or I will." She took a deep breath and continued, "If you hit him again, ever again, nobody will have to tell me to take the bloody shot." 

\-----

Mallory did not summon him later that evening. James ambled about along the terraced homes in Kensington. He saw Mallory's profile against the windows once or twice as he kept watch. He went back to his tiny flat and spent another sleepless night staring at the bottles that taunted him. He had been unable to get rid of them. 

There was no summons from the office. James lasted a week, before texting Eve. 

"He is fine," she said, dropping by with curry and root beer. She smiled when she saw the untouched bottles on James's sideboard. 

They had dinner quietly, chatting about cricket and Europop, before she left. James changed into the pair of dark jeans Vesper had bought for him in Venice, and a white polo. On his way to Kensington, for a lark, he stopped by a tacky adult store and picked up a gay porn DVD. The actors were burly, muscular, and mustachioed, and cast smoldering glances at each other on the sultry cover. He wondered if Mallory even owned a DVD player. 

The guards let him through. They must have a standing instruction then. Q's cameras veered and blinked green.

"James!" Mallory was sitting in his chair by the fireplace, doing the crossword in the Times, blinking like a surprised owl with his round glasses perched on his nose. 

James walked to him and dumped the paper-wrapped DVD on his lap. 

"A gift?" Mallory asked, surprised, pleased, as if James had wined and dined him, and brought him roses too. 

His laughter was contagious when he opened the packaging and saw the enterprising actors on the cover. 

James must have stared at him for too long, because Mallory stopped laughing, self-consciously, and said in a wry tone, "I don't think _you_ need their assistance in this venture."

"Who said it is for me?" James teased him. 

"I watch only tasteful arthouse pornography, James," Mallory said straight-faced, though the mischief in his eyes gave him away. 

Mallory had a DVD player. When he finished puttering about, setting up the DVD and adjusting the lights, he came to where James sat on the sofa, and sat down in a loose-limbed heap on the rich Turkish rugs, right between James's legs, and leaned his head back for a kiss.

James cupped his face and kissed him on his eyelids, softly, and vowed, "I won't hit you again, not in anger, not in grief." 

Mallory did not reply, and turned his head back to the screen. He did not shift away or move James's hands away from where they lingered to pet his neck, his ears, his hair, his shoulders.  
  
The plumber and the college student on screen were busy fucking in the men's at the local university. The gasps were faked and silly, and the plumber's large cock turned monstrous as the camera zoomed into where it was reaming the student's waxed arsehole. James blinked, and it was over, and the camera now showed globs of ejaculate seeping out. 

Had he watched porn before? He had not needed to. Getting laid had not been a hardship. 

"I was going to use the crescendo to turn about and suck you off," Mallory lamented, as the plumber went to fix another leak in another room, where a nerd played video games. "Their pacing does not match my plans."

"I want something else today," James informed him, relishing how Mallory looked up at him in frank curiosity. There was no protest when James turned off the television. There was no protest when James led Mallory upstairs into the bedroom. The sheets, James saw, had been changed.

"How is your arm?"

"On the mend," Mallory replied. 

"I meant what I said." 

"Bond, you know that I cannot fight you off, even if my arm were mended. You are the better shot. You are the stronger man. Your natural instinct seems to be to lash out. You harbor complex feelings of resentment and grief, and you consider me a usurper of someone more worthy whom you served for twenty years. I expect you to lash out at me again. Don't make promises you cannot keep."

This was the most Mallory had spoken to James. It was raw and frustrated, and certainly not planned. The habitual calmness had given way to a fiery tirade. James saw the man who had fought the politicians for burying M with ceremonial honours, the man who had stayed to save the MI6, the man powered by his convictions and stubbornness of will. 

Mallory cleared his throat and fiddled with his watch. James went to him and removed the instrument, placing it delicately in its case on the mantel. Mallory gave in when James undressed him, without speaking a word more. He complied when James laid out on his stomach, and spread his arms and legs in a parody of crucifixion. 

When James covered him with his clothed body, Mallory lay stiff and silent and worried beneath. When James flicked on the bedside lamps, and watched their bright light spill stark on Mallory's scarred, trembling back, he wanted to press his lips in reassurance at the nape of the neck. He did not. He waited until Mallory turned his head to meet James's eyes. 

"Did you-" Mallory seemed to be at loss for words. 

James knew what he was trying to ask. He rocked into Mallory. The porn movie had done nothing for him. Mallory, settling between his legs and looking up daring to be kissed, had sent James spiraling into lust. Mallory, yelling at him, raw and distrustful and worried, was velvet wrapped about iron. James was shaking as he looked at Mallory, lying quiescent and nerve-wracked beneath him, willing even when frightened, spread open under bright lights to be seen by another in exposure, waiting to be mocked and taunted and taken in grief by a broken man mourning his predecessor. James was glad that he was dressed. Through the worsted wool of his trousers, he felt the warmth of Mallory's textured, discolored skin, and it was all he could do not to rub himself into abandon. 

"There is no Viagra involved," James told him. "No assistance artificial or external."

"I don't have supplies." 

Mallory's voice was hoarse. James pressed his nose to his shoulder and inhaled the clean, sharp smell of him. Mallory's throat bobbed, and he looked away to gaze at the window, cheek squished onto the bed, hands laying flat and tense where James had placed them akimbo. 

"Supplies?" 

"Condoms."

James delighted in the embarrassment evident in his companion's voice. 

"You know who I am, don't you?" James teased him. "I have fucked more women than you have shaken hands with."

A variety of emotions mingled on Mallory's face, but he did not reply. James wanted to kiss him, wanted to kiss him and pledge to him. He did not. 

Instead, he taunted, "I didn't expect you to beg me for a fuck, not after all your grandstanding mere minutes ago. You must be desperate, to ask this from an unbalanced, unpredictable man who can lash out at you."

Mallory did not reply. Ninety. His heartbeat was at ninety. James nipped at a flushed, delicate earlobe to feel Mallory jerk underneath him. 

James knew how to get Mallory's heartrate to soar, staccato. Boldly, he brought his fingers to his mouth and laved them wet and then dragged them down the line of Mallory's spine, into the parting of his body, cupping his genitals from behind, leaving a thumb resting heavy on his perineum. Mallory was so warm there, vulnerable, with no artifice or strength of will. James laughed when Mallory's hands came off the bed as he threw his neck back, mouth opened in a silent gasp. 

When James pushed his thumb gently into the perineum, and scratched light, Mallory's voice caught on a scream, and his eyes were wet. 

"Ask me, Mallory. Ask me. You know I can keep you here." 

Perspiration touched the bridge of Mallory's noise, the sharp blades of his shoulders, and the long line of knobs on his spine.

"I don't have any lube," Mallory breathed, contrary, in lieu of asking, the plucky creature that he was. 

"I can have you begging me for it. If I cared, I can have you begging me to fuck you with my spit and nothing else."

There was no pride left then. Mallory's shuddering exhale was followed by his bright eyes turning soft, by a winter-touched smile gentling his mouth, and he admitted, "If you want to." 

James cupped his cheek until their gazes met. "If _I_ want to?"

Mallory's eyelashes were long, he noticed for the first time, and tears clung to them in tired determination. He smiled still, soft and surrendered, and James had not held anyone more bravely vulnerable in his arms. 

"I don't want you to hatefuck me," Mallory admitted, voice shaking, holding tight to his composure, refusing to blink his eyes lest a tear spilled. 

_Hatefuck_. As a poison from a wound, M had been fond of saying. James had administered the poison, when he had lashed out at Mallory in Skyfall, and then later in this house, when he had taunted the man and forced him to yield to James in matters that were private and intimate and desperately outside Mallory's comfort zone. James had administered the poison when he had cavalierly promised that he would not hit the man again, with no apologies for the past. 

As a poison from the wound. No apologies would set things right, would convince Mallory to trust James. Mallory was not foolish, for all his gambling. _Hatefuck_. James doubted that Mallory had even spoken aloud the word before in his life. 

"We have a deal, remember?"

"Yes, yes," Mallory agreed, and scrunched his eyes shut, putting himself in James's hands. 

James realized then that he had not thought of Vesper once that night. He shifted his weight off Mallory, alleviating his cock from rubbing itself raw in need. He gave in to his impulse from earlier in the week, and gently squeezed a palmful of Mallory's arse, parting it wide, and stared fascinated at how the act left exposed cock and balls and tightly furled hole. There were scars on the flesh there too, thin lines. Electrodes. The IRA had been systematic. How many of Mallory's torturers were alive still? James willed his hands from shaking in anger. No, this was for Mallory, not for James's craven need to avenge and defend. 

"What would Tanner think if he saw you now?"

"James, please, I don't know what you want me to do, to say. You know. You _know_." Mallory seemed unable to stop now that he had begun. His cheek was damp when James ran a thumb down his brow to chin. He began sobbing, convulsing, frightened and finally pushed to his breaking, to an utter loss of composure and will and dignity. "I can't beg you to be kind, James. I can only beg you to not hate, not while you have me like this."

"And you know," James confessed, kissing the corner of Mallory's trembling mouth. "You know that I cannot hate you now. It was never hate. It was only fear. I fear you." 

Mallory held James by his fucking soul in an unwitting clasp and did not realize that. James had made him cry, and it was no victory. What had he expected? He castigated himself, as he shoved away his mortal fear of being known, and scooped up Mallory into an embrace that was poorly received. Mallory tried to push him away, with his one good hand, hiccuping as he fought to control his tears and wretched sobs, curling in to shield his nudity from the man who had demanded it. 

"Does it protect you? To break me first?" Mallory asked, refusing eye contact, refusing James's touch. 

It was not until Mallory had taken away his gaze that James realized that he missed the startling ocean of his eyes beholding a better man than James saw in the mirror everyday. 

"It doesn't," James told him bleakly. "It doesn't protect me. I know nothing can, not when it comes to this. Have you never seen a perfect thing and wanted to take it off its pedestal?" 

Mallory laughed, and it was not a sound of joy. It was only desolation and hurt. Vesper and M and every single woman and man James had cared for, even Eve, had been broken in their own ways. Mallory was idealistic, after everything the IRA had done to him, after everything he had seen in Whitehall, after taking James to his bed even if James had struck him twice. 

"I didn't want this," Mallory said finally, voice low and uneven, lonely even though he had company. 

James knew it was his cue to leave. He should have left after the first time, as Eve had wanted him to. He had not had the fucking guts to leave then. 

He did not, even when Mallory wanted him gone. 

"Let me give you what you want," he begged, though he knew he could not. James knew to care for a lover, not for a beloved. 

It was a record, even for him. Falling to his knees before a man who had mastery over his heart in a mere week? It had taken longer with Vesper. Perhaps M's death had unreeled him more than he realized. He was lying to himself. Every part of James, broken and made by life and M and a hundred betrayals, had left him primed for this fall, to yield his life and life's last breath to the mercy of someone who willingly entrusted him to have and to hold. 

"Let me give you what you want," James beseeched, and Mallory frowned at the catch in James's voice, no doubt thinking it an artifice. 

"And what is it that you think I want?" Mallory asked, finally meeting James's gaze, brave even after what James had done to him.

Mallory did not deserve to be lied to, even if he did not deserve to be pained. The truth, James knew, would pain him. Such, often, was the nature of truth. 

"You want to be made love to as if you were whole."

Mallory's face turned pensive. And when he spoke, the pain of being known was there, tightly reined in. "You cannot give me what I want, Bond."

James placed his hands on Mallory's tense shoulders, and leaned to kiss him. Mallory's sigh was one of resignation. He parted his mouth, though, and let James take. 

They could say whatever they wanted about James, but he knew there were two truths: he was the best damn agent they had, and no woman who had taken him to bed had been disappointed by the sex. This was a man, and yet James knew, from the past week, that he could please Mallory sexually well beyond the limits of Mallory's imagination. 

James kissed him and kissed him, slow and languid, until Mallory relaxed into his embrace. There was no arousal yet, for either of them, but they were not young men. Time. They had it, as long as Mallory did not kick James out. 

James lingered at Mallory's jaw, nosing and nipping, until Mallory sighed again and offered his throat. It was not his abandon of earlier, but James could work with that. He walked his lips down the long line of Mallory's throat, and persisted in his ministrations to clavicle and breastbone and nipple, all erogenous zones he had marked in his first explorations a week ago. Mallory had an iron will, but he had no defense against James in this. His exhales turned stuttered, his hands came to clasp James in need, and his arousal was a furnace he did not know to control, that James knew well to stoke until it told in every gasp and clutch.

Mallory was not averse to being fucked, James had gleaned from their forsaken conversation from before. It would take patience and James's care, but he had both. Another day, he decided. Right then was for something lighter, that gave Mallory pleasure without fear. Abruptly, he turned around, and lay himself carefully over Mallory, minding that his legs did not strike Mallory's healing arm. 

Before Mallory could say a word, James nestled his face in the man's groin, and began licking and laving and sucking. Mallory was soft still, but that would change - yes, that was changing under James's tongue. 

He had carefully held himself aloft on his forearms and feet. Mallory could return his ministrations if he chose to, if it occurred to him. 

Instead of a mouth, Mallory's fingers came to James's hips, touching and stroking, curious, tentative, as if waiting to be told off. James said nothing. His mouth was full and he meant to keep it so. Mallory's scent was strong, more so than the first time they had done this. He found that he liked the musk. Though it was different from that of a woman's, it was the same indicator of how human and vulnerable and flawed the body underneath his was. He was charmed by how Mallory's toes were flexed in a bid to keep his hips from thrusting into James's mouth. Nobody would fault his companion for etiquette. James wanted to rip it apart, one day, to make Mallory fuck his mouth in lost bliss. That was not for then. Let the man keep what shields he had left after James's cruelty. 

Mallory's fingers had turned bolder, as they skittered up to trace from navel down the iliac crest, brushing over the pubic hair James had trimmed right before coming over to this house. Mallory's hand lingered there, on the mons pubis, uncertain again to venture further. James continued merrily in his pursuit. He remembered the first time someone had taken all of him in her mouth. He remembered how Mallory had struggled and persevered. Mallory had been bold in his inexperience, daring to try even as James had teased and mocked him for it. 

James owed it to himself, didn't he? He inhaled through his nose, as he had seen women do, and sucked Mallory in as deeply as he could. His gag reflex struggled as the cock touched his throat, and he stayed there, patient, breathing, and felt the organ expand in arousal. Mallory's hand had stilled on James's hip, and James saw that his toes were flexed to their utmost, as the man struggled to hold himself from jerking. 

When James began gently moving up and down the length of the cock he had swallowed, he realized he was brushing against jaw and sternum, leaving smears of his arousal, and Mallory did nothing to push him away. 

Later, after Mallory had orgasmed with a long gasp, James realized he had come too, before. It had happened with Vesper, when so intent on pleasing her he had lost track of himself until she giggled and pointed out that he had humped her leg and came all over her calf and thigh. 

Mallory said nothing, but stared at him, perplexed and uncertain, when James looked at the mess he had made on his lover's neck and chest. The open curiosity with which Mallory beheld him made James want to hide, to hurt the man. He chose to grin instead, and dragged his palm through the mess on Mallory's chest, rubbing it into nipple and navel. 

"Did you will yourself to orgasm?" Mallory asked softly, brave.

"Even if I had that superpower, I had no need of it," James told him frankly. "You were enough. You were more than enough." 

He realized he had said the right words, because Mallory laughed, bewildered and yet trusting. 

"Could you perhaps kiss me now?" He asked James, and James wondered what lodestone Mallory plumbed the depths of his courage from. 

"I taste of come." 

Mallory's smile was bright in invitation. James did not wait to be asked again. 

It was the first time, James realized, that Mallory kissed him so boldly, reaching his tongue to chase deep into James's mouth, taking and taking and taking. 

James let him take. 

\---   
  
"Did you know?" Q pestered him, as James tried to snoop over his shoulder to peek at the twelve split-screen terminals Q had at his workstation. 

"What should I know?"

"Mallory interceded for the IRA at the peace talks. He was the primary liaison to bring them to the table." 

James supposed that Mallory must have known most of them fairly well by then. The rapport of the torturer and the tortured. 

He did not steal Q's tea. 

\---   
  
"Bond, James Bond."

He hated these hearings. 

He had volunteered, nonetheless, and Tanner had been surprised. Eve had not said a word. 

"Please read your statement, agent."

Claire Dowar was no M. James stared at her for a long moment, as he sat where M had once sat, and began to read his prepared statement. There was Denbigh beside her. James had come to the court for Denbigh. 

"I have worked for the MI6 for twenty years. Olivia Mansfield directed me. I served her with pride, and with respect. My performance over my long career speaks for itself." 

He waited to ensure that he had the room's attention. Mallory, seated beside Tanner, kept his gaze on Claire Dowar. James had not told him. He had only told Tanner and Eve. 

"The next Director of MI6 will have a career as exemplary as Mansfield's, only if our government trusts him to do his job without unusual and unnecessary oversight. I trust Mallory to make the decisions he needs to, for the sake of the MI6, for the sake of our country." He smiled at Claire the ladykiller smile Vesper had teased him so about. Dowar's eyes softened. "I cannot but trust him, ma'am. He holds my life every time he sends me to keep our country safe. I trust him to bring me back alive."

Denbigh cleared his throat and began to speak, but James continued smoothly, directing himself to Claire. "You and I share burdens, madam. Yours is a mightier burden than mine. I safeguard our nation's interests from foreign spies and terrorists. You safeguard our nation's institutions, including the MI6, so that I may serve with pride under a director who puts our nation's interest first. You are a politician. I am not. You know better than me that collaborations are transient, conditional upon the stakes of the day." 

Claire Dowar was not going to call him to her bed. She was affected nevertheless, charmed by his praise of her, no doubt rare as it must have been in those chauvinistic circles to hear a word spoken well of a woman. 

James did not look at Mallory. 

\---- 

"You had no right to!" Mallory shouted at him, furious and flattered. 

In the small flat, his voice carried so, and James was unsurprised when his neighbors banged on the thin walls. They were university students and liked their sleep until nine in the morning. Mallory had shown up at five. He must have come directly from work. James had not gone to bed yet. He had been playing Call of Duty with Q. 

"Shall I put on tea?"

"Tea?" Mallory asked, thrown off his tirade. 

"Apologies. I don't have tea. Or biscuits." James grinned at him, neatly taking the wind out of his sails. "Let us go to your place. You can shout at me to your heart's content there. And I can make you tea."

"What-" Mallory shook his head. "I mean to shout at you. You needn't make tea." 

"What are we waiting for then?" 

James chivvied him out, picking up his coat on his way, and locked the flat behind them. Mallory's car waited idling on the street. James nodded to the driver. Percy. He had been M's driver too. 

"Good to see you again, sir," Percy said, grinning. 

"He is an insubordinate wretch. Don't entertain his ego, Mr. Wentworth." 

James bit back a smile and peered out the window as they drove to Kensington. 

After they had bid Percy a good night, and nodded to the guards and crossed the cameras, when they had locked the door behind them, James crowded Mallory to the nearest wall, and pressed a kiss to his brow, and asked, "An insubordinate wretch, am I?"

"Whatever possessed you?" Mallory demanded, his fury returning easily. He did not move from James's hold. "You have a target painted on your back now. Denbigh is a dangerous man."

"So I should have let you walk about with a target painted on your back."

"I can take care of myself." 

He could. He had offered to be the liaison for intermediating with the IRA, and worked tirelessly to bring them to the table for peace talks. He would have walked the tightrope between Denbigh's sabotage and MI6's safety and integrity without a word of protest. 

"Too late now."

"I should have let you die from the alcohol poisoning."

James said nothing. 

"I didn't mean that. I apologise," Mallory hastened to add, stricken. James shook his head.

"Nobody has protected me before," Mallory continued, embarrassed. "You must excuse my poor manners." He reached out tentatively to straighten a lapel of James's peacoat. His fingers trembled. 

And then James realized why Mallory had not been as hurt as he should have been when James had stated that Mallory wanted to be made love to as if he were whole. It was the truth, but there had been more that James had failed to unearth. Mallory wanted to be _loved_ as if he were whole. Knowing gave him the courage to tell Mallory what he had done. 

"I applied to the Signal Intercepts division, to lead foreign intelligence interception." 

"That is an administrative position," Mallory said, chiding. "You will be bored in a week." Hope was stark on his face and James had not seen a sight lovelier. 

"Consider it a sabbatical."

"This is preposterous, you realize. What more could I possibly give you?"

Mallory had no face for poker, at least not in James's company. 

There was no fucking way James was going on missions to far corners of the world when Denbigh remained in power, leaving Mallory to his mercy. James knew a killer when he saw one. It had not been a politician who had sat at Claire's right. 

James had stayed in London to protect M, and look where that had ended. He swallowed.

"I trust you to protect me, James," Mallory said quietly, reading him with ease. "It is merely that I happen to think you will be better off on a mission to exotic lands to save our country." 

"Will you order me away?"

Mallory would not. James knew that. Mallory liked volunteers, not soldiers, for all that he was a soldier at heart. 

"A word more from you, and Claire would have started an affair," Mallory muttered, changing the topic.

"Why do you think they call me the pussy-juicer?" 

"Juvenile." 

Mallory's smile was untouched by worries then, as he stood there in James's hold against the wall, amused despite himself. 

"I am going to demand my payment for the valiant defense today," James informed him. 

"Shall I get to my knees and reward you?" Mallory suggested. "Nothing like a blowjob at seven in the morning to whet your appetite for breakfast."

He had nothing clever to say when James spun him around to face the wall, when James plucked away his braces and dragged down his trousers and boxers both, when James gathered his shirttails and asked, "Mind holding this out of the way for me?"

James had liked intercrural with women. He found that it was equally pleasing with Mallory. Without being bidden, Mallory's thighs tightened to make a snug channel. James dragged through and up, sure to hit the mass of Mallory's scrotum and balls at each upstroke. Lubrication would have been handy, but the eroticism made up for the rough motions. He began kissing Mallory's jaw, smiling against the pulse that leapt there. 

"Next time, I will have you hump the wall when I do this," he teased. Teasing was dangerous, given the cruelty of before, when it had veered into mockery. Mallory did not mind right then, because he jerked back into James's hold, and his breath stuttered when the motion dragged his arse against the denim James wore. Mallory's hands let go of his shirt and came up frantic to intertwine with James's grip on the wall, needing the contact, when James came slick down the length of his inner thighs. James turned him about into a kiss, luxuriating in the sight he made, crisp shirt and cufflinks at odds with the nudity below his waist, the blooming red where James had sucked below his ear, the uneven breathing marred by need, the sweat pooling down his brow, the cock that hardened against James's denim - and oh, how he looked, smiling bright at James, unbalanced, with the wetness of James's spend between his thighs. James grinned back and cupped Mallory's cheeks to kiss him softly.

"One hundred," he murmured.

"Have you been tracking my heartbeat all along?" Mallory asked, laughing. "I am flattered so."

"Wait until I have Q plot it and predict what will make it skip to a hundred and thirty."

"Such nefarious schemes," Mallory said, unbothered by the teasing, his palms easy and firm at James's waist. 

He remained aroused, and James wanted to keep him just so. It was unlikely that Mallory would initiate or ask for reciprocation. The exhaustion writ dark about Mallory's eyes after eighteen hours of work made James want to feed him, and bathe him, and send him off to bed with an orgasm. 

When Mallory bent to pull up his trousers, James caught his hands. 

"You don't need that now. Wear my come at breakfast." 

Vesper had liked wearing James's shirt and nothing else, after sex. She had been comfortable in nudity before James, even when James had been clothed. She had been a beautiful woman. What need had she for shame? Mallory looked at him, uncertain, fretful. James was not worried. He knew how brave the man could be, even when shoved out of his comfort zone. 

"I will stain the upholstery," Mallory noted finally, rubbing his thighs together in discomfort. The seep of blood that flushed his cheeks and neck was lovely and James had to force himself from pressing his lips to that warm skin. 

"You can sit on my lap," James assured him, laughing at the scandal and shock on his companion's face. 

"Pornographic stereotypes are the other way around," Mallory complained, though he did not refuse. James had known he would not refuse. 

"Nurse salacious fantasies of subordinates dancing to your whims, do you now?" James asked wryly. "I suppose I would look resplendent in a leather collar."

"You are resplendent as you are," Mallory said flatly. James was warmed by the matter-of-fact praise. Neither Vesper nor any of his previous lovers or friends had been so guilelessly charming. 

Mallory stayed as James wanted, naked from the waist down, drinking the tea James had made, and watched James chop tomatoes and slice bacon for their breakfast. 

"Do you think Denbigh has cameras hidden in your house?" James teased him, heart bursting with affection at how Mallory sighed in pleasure as he sipped at his tea. James had added a dollop of cream, and half a teaspoon of sugar, as Eve had informed him after a great deal of wheedling on his part. 

"Would you care?" Mallory retorted. 

"Let him see how you have house trained me," James laughed, touched by how unconcerned Mallory was by anyone finding out about their involvement. "I haven't made anyone breakfast in years."

"What a charitable fellow you make. I am certain that parading me about half-naked and filthy has nothing to do with your housekeeping."

He would never have had enough of Mallory's bashful smiles and self-deprecation when it came to this. 

"It has something to do with my charity, certainly," James informed him as he chivvied them to the dining table with more tea and their breakfast. 

A single plate. Mallory came easily enough when James dragged him astride his lap, facing him. He wanted to watch every expression of shock and vulnerability that flickered through Mallory's gaze. When James brought a hand to squeeze Mallory's arse in greeting, he felt Mallory's cock leapt against his stomach, and Mallory flushed and closed his eyes in embarrassment. 

"Keep doing that, and our breakfast will be a long affair," James needled him. 

"Oh, I am confident that you will find ways to drag this out," Mallory replied stoically, resigned to his fate, though his bright smile gave it all away. 

"What is it?" Mallory asked, when James ceased the banter, when James could only look at the man he held close. 

Tennyson would haunt James until his dying day, he knew then. Onwards. What else could his measly heart do? 

He swallowed the words down, and pressed a kiss to Mallory's nose, and winked. Mallory frowned, reading him easily, but did not comment on the distraction. Halfway through breakfast, he was emboldened enough to press his lips to James's, sharing a kiss of tea and honey. As they ended their meal, his exhaustion caught up with him, and he was yawning and leaning into James's hold before shaking himself alert every few minutes. 

"Up with you. A bath and bed."

"Do you have places to be?" Mallory asked, blinking his eyes open with effort. His voice was low and soft when he was on this cusp of sleep-deprived exhaustion. James bit back the poetry he wanted to speak into Mallory's ear. He could not bear the mockery that might ensue.

"I am staying, if you don't mind."

"Why would I mind?" Mallory queried, too tired to obfuscate his preferences in politeness. "You have free run of the house."

"Everything in the house?" James teased him, running his hands up and down Mallory's thighs. "I might take you up on it."

"I wouldn't expect anything else," Mallory said wryly, getting to his feet, stretching the kinks out of his neck, unaware of the debauched portrait he made. "You and I know that you have free run of me."  
  
"Upstairs then. I want to watch you pull yourself off in the shower." 

"One of these days, I shan't be shocked by your perversions," Mallory threatened. James laughed. That day, they both knew, was not any day soon. 

James bossed him into the shower. He had liked showering with Vesper. She had been a bold thing and he could only follow where she led. Mallory seemed skeptical of their misadventure, as he stood facing James, at a loss as to what next. 

"Go on, then," James said, stripping and stepping into the shower with him. He took the bar of soap and began running it up and down Mallory's water-warmed skin. 

"I have not done this in a long while," Mallory muttered, looking down at his cock in mild concern. "I usually masturbate in bed."

"I knew that. You are a hedonist," James teased him. 

That was true. The shower rivaled what James had seen in Middle Eastern luxury hotels. Mallory did not have any qualms in indulging his sensuality in other aspects of his life. James wanted to see his self-indulgence bloom in his sexuality too. 

"Come now, let me see you slumming like the rest of us who pull ourselves off in the shower before running to catch the Tube to work." James leaned against the wall, and looked at him with brows raised. "Touch yourself. Do I have to teach you how to? Even schoolboys manage, you know."

"The filth you speak," Mallory complained. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back into the shower, and his right hand came to his cock while his left hand skirted down his chest in sensual fondling. Rivulets of water ran down his chest, streaking his pubic hair into lines of black, and he thrust into his hand in increasing abandon. 

"Open your eyes. Look at me. You are doing this because I asked you to. Do you think I will let you forget that?"

Mallory's gaze was blown in arousal. He reached for James, and pulled him close, into a wet kiss under the warm shower, and kept his eyes wide open as he continued jerking himself off, his cock brushing against James's hip at every stroke. If James had been a younger man, it would have been enough for another round. As it stood, he fell into kissing Mallory fiercely, chasing his mouth whenever they parted for breath, swallowing every gasp and bitten off exclamation. 

When James shifted a hand to fondle Mallory's balls, he came into his hand with a cry. He was boneless and half-asleep when James turned off the water and dried him warm.

"I am frightened too," Mallory murmured, as James knelt to rub his legs dry. His toes, James noticed in a dull ache, had been broken several times and reset. 

"You? You went back to treat with the IRA. I doubt anything scares you, for very long," James commented, smiling up at him, resisting the urge to spout Tennyson. 

He ran the towel to dry Mallory one last time and plucked the dressing gown that lay on a warming stand. Mallory let James bundle him into it, and yawned again, limbless and loose in James's embrace as they stumbled to the bed. He melted into near sleep as soon as he lay down and turned immediately to press his nose into James's neck when James followed him. 

"I cannot hide from you. It frightens me," he murmured, settling his head on James's heart.

Mallory's bravery was nothing James could reciprocate. When he had fallen into deep sleep, James spoke Tennyson's poetry to him. 

_"I cannot love thee as I ought,_  
_For love reflects the thing beloved;_  
_My words are only words, and moved_  
_Upon the topmost froth of thought."_

Even a coward, James had come to realize, needed to speak, to at least the darkness of a silent night if not plainly to what the heart held beloved.

He slept better on his own and yet he preferred to be in this bed, watching Mallory sleep unburdened by guilt or fear. 

He wondered if Silva had known moments of grace. He hoped Silva had been spared this - this led to Vesper sinking into the deep waters with love murmured on her last breath knowing that he would do his best to hate her for it, this led to Mallory weeping in his arms, broken by James's cruelty. Silva had suffered enough; blood squeezed from stone, as Mallory had stated. 

He wouldn't wish his fate on Silva. He wouldn't want his fate changed. 

\----

  
"I was waiting for you yesterday," Q complained, when James logged into play their usual Call of Duty game. James kept missing their usual standing appointment, thanks to the utter distraction that Mallory was turning to be.

He had not gone back to his flat in weeks. 

"Places to be, things to do," James said cheerfully, and cursed when Q killed him again. Q could not shoot straight in the range, despite James spending hours training him to. He was very good at killing James in computer games. 

"I know you, Bond. You are fucking somebody."

"We can't all be happy with cats, can we now?" James teased him. Q's dating life was a source of constant amusement to him. Q pestered him often to help him create and redo profiles on Tinder. 

"How do you meet single women so easily?" Q demanded. "I went to a bar yesterday and the one girl I talked to said she was waiting for her boyfriend." 

"Why should I tell you my secrets?"

"Bond, if I don't get laid anytime soon, I will find creative ways to make sure nobody else does."

"I suppose I can accompany you tonight to a pub and train you to become a real man," James replied, and Q killed him again in retaliation. 

"Cheers," Q said, grumpy and somehow making it sound affectionate. It must be the cats he kept rubbing off on him, James supposed.

\----

"I can't come by tonight. I took Q out to a pub to teach him to pick up women. He got roaring drunk, stripped off, leapt on the pool table, and lectured the pub about Turing's Halting Problem. I now need to charm the officer on duty to let me take Q back to his place to sleep it off." 

As far as texts went, that was fairly self-contained. Mallory texted him back as he waited at the holding cell at 2 AM where they had thrown Q into for the night on charges of drunken public mischief. 

"Dinner and drinks with Denbigh. Q has a 4 AM call with Israel."

James raised his eyebrows in mild worry. What could Denbigh want with Mallory at this hour? Then again, Mallory tended to work long eighteen-hour days on Mondays and Tuesdays, before taking Wednesday off. He pulled long hours again on Thursdays, before taking Friday off. His dinner engagements began at ten on the days he worked. He had none of M's discipline when it came to scheduling or paperwork. Fortunately, Eve had the forbearance of a saint. 

After taking Q to his apartment, and making a pot of strong tea for him, James fed his angry cats and made sure that he was sober enough to take his 4 AM call. 

"Go away, I am not a child," Q complained. 

James would wait to bring out the blackmail videos from their outing. 

When he drove down to Mallory's house, he shook his head at how he had focused on what he could do to Mallory next whenever he had wanted to order a drink at the pub that night. Addictions, M had always said, were replaced by other addictions. 

\---- 

Mallory was in bed when James crept in, and he smelled of toothpaste and soap. When James kissed him, he tasted cognac. A craving for drink hit him then. 

"Don't," he said flatly, when Mallory opened his mouth to no doubt apologize. "Cognac takes a while to wash off." 

"I know," Mallory said, miserable. "Denbigh ordered for me." 

Mallory, James realized, had not imbibed a drop in his presence the entire time James had been trying to stay sober. He might have been drinking at the dinners and lunches he attended for work, but he had never tasted of alcohol whenever James had kissed him, until then. 

Denbigh must have known how it was then. 

"Denbigh knows," Mallory confirmed. "He gave me a reference to a sexual psychologist should I find myself struggling to be intimate with you."

Mallory was too seasoned to be affected by a schoolboy taunt. James held him closer, and asked, "What else did he say?" 

He did not get a reply. 

"Tell me," James demanded. "He will drag me into this, soon. You know how the game is played. He knows you will hesitate to confide in me. He is angling for reactions, for vulnerabilities. I would rather hear it from you first." 

M had hidden everything from James. She had been willing to die for her secrets. Vesper had done the same. James was not going to let Mallory do that to him. 

"He helped me take my coat off as we sat down for dinner. He brushed my chest and said that he knew what the IRA had done, that he knew what they had done to every inch of me, and that I was so brave for my country."

Mallory recited matter-of-factly, as if quoting off an expense report. James waited in silence.

"He said he was glad that they had not castrated me, that they had not tortured me sexually, even if it was a pity that they were barbarian enough to slice off my nipple and stick live wires into my flesh."

Denbigh was no politician. He was a murderer. Mallory could not win this game unless he remembered that he ran a bureau with a license to kill.

"Do you have family he might threaten? Your parents live here in London, don't they?" James had not heard Mallory speak of family before. There were no photographs in the house. Mallory's father was titled. Everyone knew that. James ran his hand over the ring Mallory wore. Mallory had not married. He had no children. 

"My family and I are estranged. The title will pass to my cousin." 

Mallory's mother was a retired Crown Prosecutor. Men as Mallory was, were made by mothers who knew to love their children. 

"You should warn your parents."

"We haven't spoken in years," Mallory muttered. He was tense in James's embrace, and his voice bled the dull pain of an old wound. 

\----- 

"Mrs. Mallory," James smiled at the old woman when he was shown to her sitting room in Kensington. She lived with her husband merely a few blocks away from her son's house. 

"Edith," she said. Her eyes were bright, just like her son's. "After few years in the States, I tire now of the formalities we insist upon here." 

There was a photograph of him behind her. He was in uniform, in his early twenties, wide-eyed and cheerful, and James had been killing for M at that age. _And Life, a Fury slinging flame._ Mallory had learned it, just as James had.   
  
"We will instrument your home, with your permission," he told her. "It is necessary, I am afraid."

"James Bond, MI6." She nodded at the card he had given her. "He called to inform me that you would visit to apprise us of precautions we must take in the coming weeks. What is wrong with him now?" 

James had heard that tone of care from M often enough, when she pressed him for news under a poor cover of gruffness. 

"He is my superior, madam."

"You aren't a faceless spy. He would not send one here." Her eyes were sharp. "He has not called me in nearly five years, Mr. Bond." 

James did not reply to that. He walked her methodically through the procedural precautions MI6 recommended for family members of key government officials. 

As she saw him out, she clasped his elbow at the window he had used to sneak in. James found it hard not to yield, not when Edith had her son's expressive eyes. 

"Mr. Bond, two months after they took him, we were told by the government to hold a funeral service with an empty coffin."

"He is well-protected now," James assured her, as he struggled not to think of Skyfall and M. 

"Harrow, Oxford, GCHQ - Simon and I were always so proud of him," Edith continued, as if he had not said anything. "When he first thought to enlist in the Air Force, we fought him on his decision day and night, for weeks. He was always so stubborn." 

James could see where Mallory got his stubbornness from. 

Edith paused and said, "Wait a moment." She came back with a sand-colored SAS beret, blood-soaked despite multiple washes, and on it was the iconic downward Excalibur wreathed in flames with the motto _Who Dares, Wins_. Mallory dared, even after everything that had happened to him. 

"No mother wants her son to fail. I wanted him to, when he enlisted for the selection to the SAS. Let him fail, I prayed. I had a foreboding, a premonition. He laughed it off, called me fanciful and overwrought." She shook her head. "The IRA had been kind enough to send us this, with their condolences, on the day of the funeral."

Mallory's mother had the same bravery in the face of vulnerability that he did. James could not shield his knowing then, and she sighed when she saw the truth. 

"Here," she said, offering the beret to him. "Keep him safe." 

\---- 


	3. Flower in the crannied wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be a bit of a roller-coaster, but please be reassured that we'll wind up in a quiet, warm place.

"Eve, what do you want to be in five years?"

Eve was playing Angry Birds on her phone and snorted at the question. 

James helped himself to Q's over-baked lasagna and wondered if Mallory liked Italian fare. He seemed hedonistic enough to have opinions on food. James had only cooked him breakfast so far. They had not dined together yet, what with their schedules perpetually in conflict.

"Are you still dawdling over the forms?" Q asked, peering over James's shoulder at the paperwork sprawled across. 

They were having their late Thursday lunch together in Tanner's office. Tanner had gone off to find a bottle of hot sauce. He could not stomach bland food without Sichuan spices. Weirdo. James was trying to fill in all the paperwork they were haggling him for before they would let him have the contract for the bloody desk job in Signal Intercepts. He half-suspected Mallory behind this sudden profusion of paperwork. Background checks, they said, as if any multiple-choice selection box would account for James's background. 

"It is your birthday tomorrow," Q pointed out, stabbing a sauce-covered fork on his paperwork, right where James had neatly written out his birthdate. Now there was sauce on his background check. 

"You are a bloody child," James muttered, shoving him off. 

"I am not the one on probation! We should do something for your birthday," Q pestered him. 

"I am forty-two, you idiot." 

"All the more reason to. Who knows if you will have another?" 

"And on that fine note of optimism," James muttered, signing his name at the end of the paperwork with flourish. 

Mallory was going to get an earful from him if the paperwork came back with addendums. Christ, it was as if the fucking idiot wanted him gone on a mission to Ethiopia. Mallory, in his own twisted form of caring, wanted James far away from Denbigh. 

"Let's have dinner at my place tonight," Eve offered. "I vacuumed this weekend." 

"What are we celebrating?" Tanner asked, and poured a dollop of hot sauce on Q's over-baked lasagna. A smidge sprayed onto James's paperwork. Wonderful. 

"Bond is turning forty-two tomorrow," Q informed him. 

"I can't believe you are still alive," Tanner muttered. "Anything you want me to pick up at Tesco's on the way?"

"She lives across a fucking Aldi," James pointed out. 

"Exactly. We have got to have standards now, don't we?" Tanner said. "Eve, do you want to invite M along?"

They had already started calling Mallory M. James wondered what Mallory thought of it. 

"I don't know about that," Q said, nervous at the prospect. He liked Mallory, but he was quite intimidated by the man. "Bond, do you want the boss there?"

"It is my place and I am going to invite him. Fuck what Bond wants. It isn't as if M works on Fridays. He can sleep it off tomorrow." 

Eve settled the matter like the utter harridan she was when it came to James. He blamed Mallory for encouraging her authoritarian bent. 

\---

"I will join you at eleven," Eve read the text aloud and burped.

They sat on her carpet drinking cheap beer and snacking on Nando's peri-peri wings, playing Scrabble. Q had won every game in the first five rounds. Then he had been too drunk and Tanner had started winning. Q then pouted and sulked, and pinched James in the ribs when James called him a child. 

James had stayed away from the beer. It had never been his tipple of choice. He was grateful for Tanner's perception. 

Mallory joined them at eleven. 

"I told you to come here at nine!" Eve lambasted him, and swayed a bit drunkenly, and glared at him when he tried to take off his coat by himself. 

"My flat, my rules!" She notified him, and helped him out of his coat and snatched his umbrella away. James grinned at him. 

"It's your rules everywhere, Miss Moneypenny," Mallory said, long-suffering, and let her drag him to the carpet where Q was now sabotaging Tanner's focus by licking the letter blocks. 

"I don't think I should," Mallory said, demurring, when Eve passed him a beer from the cooler and the basket of wings gone cold. 

He had been teetotaling to ensure James did not taste alcohol in his mouth when they kissed. The consideration made James want to shake him until it hurt. He was a changed man, though, and these days he settled for loving Mallory instead of hurting him. 

"Drink up," James encouraged him. "Q is going to strip for us soon and you will need all the intoxication you can get." 

"Good idea," Q muttered. "Eve, why don't women lick me all over when I strip in pubs?"

Tanner laughed until he was clutching his ribs. James had not seen him stop grieving after M's death. It was good to watch him giggle, mildly drunk and utterly entertained by Q's antics. Eve was giving pointers. 

Mallory picked up a wing and examined it from every angle, fascinated. Even Q had given up on them, after they had gone cold. Mallory's eyes lit up at the first bite. He was not disappointed. How could he be? James suspected he had no idea what he was eating. He made a note to ruin the man with junk food. 

"Got to start at the shoes, you see. Socks are not sexy, unless they are hose and garters," Eve was explaining. 

"I don't have any," Q said, all woeful. "None of the fancy male stripper shit." He glared at Mallory's braces and cufflinks with utter tactlessness. Tanner burst into laughter again. James smacked the back of Q's head. 

"My accoutrements are functional, Q," Mallory said, taking the remark with grace. 

There was mischief in his gaze, testifying to how entertained he was, and James had to stop himself from tracking how Mallory's throat bobbed when he drank beer straight from the bottle of Guinness. Eve winked at him. 

"Accoutrements," Tanner contemplated, with the delicate care of a drunken man. "Accordion. Accord. Accost. Accost!" 

Q made a sound like a dying cat, a long and horrid screech, when Tanner won the game with the word. 

"Bond, help me buy a kilt," Q continued, throwing evil glares at Tanner as he did his victory dance.

"You should learn to work your your bedraggled nerd chic," Eve opined, burping again. "M, get the cake and the champagne from the kitchen? We were waiting for you and you were late." 

"Anything you demand, Miss Moneypenny," Mallory said, getting to his feet, and James knew this was the entire reason why Eve was an entitled bitch. M would not have let her get away with so much. Mallory fucking spoiled Eve worse than a Siamese cat. 

"Yes! We should have James blow the cake at midnight."

Mallory's surprised laugh was resonant in the small flat. Q was pleased with his drunken wit. Tanner was chortling again. And Eve looked so proud of herself as if it had been all of her making. James shook his head and got off the carpet to help Mallory ferry the cake and the champagne. 

Tanner had bought the champagne, a respectable Veuve Clicquot Brut from Tesco. Q had baked the cake. 

"Oh dear," Mallory said, looking at the monstrosity. "Perhaps you should help him find better pornography, James." 

James. Mallory had never called him that outside sex. 

How tempting it was to kiss him right then. Q's cake thankfully muted such pleasant fantasies, the Lovecraftian horror that it was. James had seen several hundred cunts in his life, of all ages and forms, and he was sure this cake bore no passing resemblance to cunts dead or living. Perhaps it was a Star Trek thing; Q did like the interspecies avatars in their computer games. 

"Artistic liberties," Q defended himself, when Mallory placed the cake on the table. Tanner started laughing again and Eve looked mighty outraged though she was grinning too at the ridiculous thing. 

"Where do you want me to place the candle?" Mallory asked. 

His eyes were so bright as he laughed and his face was open when he looked up at James. Edith had not seen her son in years, James thought then, and wondered if she marked his birthdays anyway, wishing that he had found a reason to celebrate too, even if away from his family. 

"Stick it on the clit, M," Eve deadpanned. Tanner buried his face in James's shoulder, giggling. 

"I am personally more of a twat man myself," Q explained earnestly. 

"No wonder you can't get laid," Tanner muttered. "Bond, you get laid every time you want to get laid. Where would you place the candle?" 

The devil must have taken James then, because he stepped behind Mallory, and gripped his wrist and danced it over the obscene cake. Mallory's pulse leapt against his palm. The cake was soft and the candle went in easily into Q's artistic vision of the female arsehole. Mallory's cuff came away with pink cream.

"How...novel," Q said. "Should I be offering anal to get laid, Bond?"

"I am not bailing you out when you are charged for reaming unsuspecting arseholes," Eve muttered. "Stick to your fleshlight, Q."

"I could customize it and practice," Q allowed, and James was unfortunately sure that he meant it in earnest. Q was a danger to society. They ought to get him laid before he turned into Ted Bundy.

Mallory lit the candle while they bantered. James was still standing behind him and felt his warmth exude. He wished he could wrap his arms about Mallory's waist and measure his heartbeat. 

Eve led the chorus of Happy Birthday as James blew the candle out from Q's cake's arsehole. It was the first time he had had cake for his birthday. He looked up at Eve in gratitude. She had forgiven him for M's death, in her own way. 

"To a boring desk job for the rest of your life," Tanner toasted, raising his champagne flute. Q had brought along hot sauce for his cake. 

"To TED talks on seduction," Q offered, eating his piece of clit with relish. The cake was bloody delicious, for all of Q's baking foibles. 

"To not taking the bloody shot," Eve said, teasing and solemn. He hugged her for forgiving him and clinked his glass of sparkling water against her champagne.

"James," Mallory said, raising his flute to him, with that soft, embarrassed smile, brave enough to broach a hint of what they had become to each other. 

_Thy creature, whom I found so fair_ , Tennyson had written torn by love's grief. James had in his tiny flat, on his bed, the bloodied beret Edith had given him. 

"Gareth," James offered, flaying his heart raw just to see the unbridled joy in his lover's expressive eyes. 

\----

"Let me brush my teeth," Mallory warned, when James swooped to kiss him as soon as the door closed behind them. 

"I don't fucking care about that right now," James said frankly, and the stale taste of beer and champagne and cake and chicken did not put him off at all, did not make him want to drink. He wanted more of Mallory's sighs and inadvertent clutches at his leather jacket. 

"Upstairs," Mallory said, pushing him away firmly, using his strength without qualm.

"Refusing my offer of armchair frottage?" James dared him. 

"It is your birthday. The ambience would not suit the event," Mallory said wryly, tugging him up the stairs. James knew better than to argue when Mallory was being obstinate. 

"Look at you criticizing the ambience of my sexual offerings. It was not that long ago that you were scared to death of your own cock." 

"Google helps."

"This is my fate," James lamented.   
  
"Oh, it could be worse, James," Mallory said, laughing. "I could be Q." 

James opened the bedroom door and stood at the threshold, frightened. Mallory had lit what had to be at least a hundred candles and placed them everywhere, from floor to windowsill, from bed posts to mantel. L.E.D candles, thank Christ. Everything in Mallory's hedonistic bedroom was flammable. 

On the bed was a thin object, wrapped in brown. James suspected it was the same wrapping paper he had used to wrap the gay porn DVD he had gifted Mallory on a lark. Mallory's incisive intelligence and observation of the smallest details at times scared James. 

"Don't mock me," Mallory warned.

"I wasn't going to," James said truthfully. He had difficulty breathing, difficulty not spouting Tennyson at Mallory while he stood there frozen on the bedroom threshold. Wit and mockery were far out of his grasp right then. 

Mallory sniffed, no doubt skeptical of James's reaction. James kissed the worry out of him, reassuring him with nip and caress. 

"Nobody has cherished me before. You must excuse my poor manners," James said, borrowing the words Mallory had said once to him. At least, he thought gratefully, he had only to tread along the path Mallory had carved ahead, bravely. 

Mallory went to brush. James entered the bathroom behind him, noticing with fondness how carefully he swished and gargled the taste of liquor away so that James could kiss him without memories of his addiction. 

There were fucking roses on their stems in the half-filled decadent bathtub. Mallory must have left them there before running to Eve's, to keep them fresh. 

Bedlam. He refrained from laughing hysterically and instead got to his business, flipping open the toilet lid and taking his cock out for a much needed piss. Mallory had stopped gargling, and was staring at him in fascination.

James had not had many boundaries with lovers he was familiar with before. Hotel rooms tended not to foster ample privacy for the individual. Mallory, he realized, had no notion of such domesticity. He had grown up an only child. His stint in the SAS, given his stellar scores going in, must have been pampered with little luxuries. He had never been rank and file. 

"I didn't mean to gawk," Mallory offered an apology before James could say a word. "There is another bathroom across the hall, you know. I was merely surprised."

"Too far away from you," James noted. He zipped himself up, flushed the toilet, and nudged Mallory with his hip so that he could have the basin to wash his hands. "What are the roses for?" 

"I meant to petal them on the bed," Mallory said, still quite stunned by what James had done. There was a bit of toothpaste foam at the corner of his mouth. James wiped it off with a thumb.

"I realized then that would stain my sheets," Mallory continued, and shifted closer to kiss James, and he tasted of spearmint. "Now I don't know what to do with them."

"I will fetch a vase for your roses," James said, laughing. "I appreciate the gesture, even if you could not sacrifice your silk for the sake of ambience."

"They are imported from Soufli," Mallory complained. 

James was not surprised that Mallory had found his sheets in the last Hellenic silk town of Europe. Not surprised at all. Christmas gifting was going to be troublesome. James usually had gifted Steam subscriptions for Q, a bottle of Mexican hot sauce for Tanner, and Chanel for Eve. M and he had had no gifting between them, until she had left him the dog at the end. 

He supposed he could get Mallory terrible gay porn DVDs and make it a tradition. 

He picked up the roses from the bath. They were fresh cut and he was taken back to the gardens in Provins. He shook his head at the sheer madness of it all, and went to place them in a bronze vase. He brought the vase back and placed it by the bed. In the light of the candles, against the sheen of silk sheets, the flowers reminded him of Greek myths. He had not seduced a woman with roses before. 

"There is usually champagne and strawberries involved," he told Mallory, when the man joined him. 

"We cannot have champagne for reasons we know. And strawberries," Mallory shuddered delicately. "My sheets are from Soufli, James." 

"Fussy prat," James said, laughing, and tumbled them onto the sheets from Soufli. "I suppose I should be grateful you don't complain about coming on your sheets." He rose to his forearms and bracketed Mallory with his body, looking down at him in the candlelight. 

"That is the point," Mallory explained, beaming up at James. "I conducted a long and exhaustive analysis before settling on silk."

"Is that what you now call your compulsive masturbation habits?" James teased, kissing the dudgeon out of his lover. 

"You should know that I have kept my end of the deal," Mallory breathed, all mussed and light-headed by James's kisses and by James's slow grinding against his body. His eyes gleamed in the soft light. The candles had been a wonderful idea, James had to allow, for how they cast Mallory into warmth and liquid grace. "I have not touched myself, even once, except at your behest."

"Keep talking filth like that and you will have me coming in my trousers." 

"Take them off then," Mallory said, unapologetic. "No trousers in bed." Then his eyes gleamed brighter still, and said, "No, don't. Let me."

He had not undressed a man before. He was clumsy but determined, as he opened the placket of James's trousers and tugged down, before he realized that the belt lay in the way. He managed to remove the trousers, tugging down the boxers with them, and then came hurried to peel up the turtleneck James wore, losing his patience rather rapidly when it snagged on the wristwatch James had not taken off yet. It was fortunate, James thought, that Mallory did not know how charming he was in these moments of all too human frustration and impatience.

"Oh," Mallory murmured then, perfectly still, stricken by the sight of James nude above him. He reached to place his palm on a bare shoulder, but hesitated, hand suspended in mid-air. The candlelight threw his desire into starkness. Nobody, _nobody_ , had beheld James with such awed lust.   
  
It was the first time, he realized, that Mallory had seen him nude at leisure, without being half-out of his senses in a sexual game. 

"Your turn," James said, embarrassed a jot by how Mallory stared. 

"As you please," Mallory murmured, utterly wrapped up in watching James, his eyes shifting from limb to face to chest to groin in ardency. 

The problem with Mallory, James reflected wryly, was that he was painfully sincere in bed. His heart could not take more of this. He half-suspected that he could _come_ just from watching Mallory look at him so. 

He shifted his focus to undressing the man so that he had something else to occupy his mind with. 

  
"Open the gift, please" Mallory offered then, when James had finished undressing him. The candles, James thought again, looking down at his lover, had been a splendid idea.

It was a book of Tennyson's poetry. James's heart caught in his throat. The book fell open to the Flower in the Crannied Wall, and he found flat between the pages a sachet of lubricant and a condom. 

"Would you recite it for me?" James asked, and hated how hoarse his voice was. 

"If you wish," Mallory replied quietly. He shook his head with a faint smile when James offered the book. 

_"Flower in the crannied wall,_  
_I pluck you out of the crannies,_  
_I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,_  
_Little flower -but if I could understand_  
_What you are, root and all, and all in all,_  
_I should know what God and man is._ "

Mallory's voice was cut for poetry, low and melodious as it was. His gaze sharpened in concern when he saw the pain on James's face. 

James pressed a kiss to waive the worry far, and said, "You do hold me in your hand, root and all, and all in all." He blinked his tears away. Mallory had gone to great lengths. He was not going to wax maudlin and weep in joy all over the darling man. 

"Have you ever played with anal toys?" 

"Of course not," Mallory said, laughing. "As you said earlier downstairs, I was scared of my own cock until you came along with your deal." 

James had been pegged before, by an adventurous woman or two. It was intimate and invasive. Mallory was not ready, not yet. James knew that instinctively. Telling Mallory so would only turn him obstinate. Fortunately, James knew how to distract the man thoroughly. It deserved contemplation, James knew, that his fantasies involving Mallory mirrored his fantasies involving Vesper often.

He lay beside Mallory and nudged him to reverse their positions. Mallory preferred to be on his back with James over him, the lazy sensualist that he was. 

"I don't know if I can ride you. I don't know how to," Mallory said, all nerves all of a sudden. James had been right. Mallory was not ready for a cock in his arse, not yet. 

"I will start you off easy," James teased him, keeping him unsettled, so that he would not suss out that there was going to be no fucking that night. He gripped Mallory's hips tight and pushed him up, until he straddled James's head. 

He had loved eating out Vesper in this position, snug and contained between her thighs, nose and mouth buried in her cunt and arse, at her mercy, gasping to win every breath he took as she ground herself against him. 

"James?" Mallory asked, and he was trembling, bashful, unsure, and starting to be afraid. 

Good, let him suffer. Nerves were good for his arousal, wired straight to his cock, at least in bed with James. Mallory orgasmed hard when James showed him something new. He was truly frightened only when James plucked at his emotions carelessly. Physical vulnerability at James's hands in a sexual setting got him off like nothing else did. 

"You are going to practice here, riding my mouth," James breathed against him, and the warm exhale against Mallory's groin made his thighs quiver. "If you do well, we will graduate you to my cock up your lovely arse." 

"Lovely arse," Mallory repeated, incredulous, even amidst his nerves. "Where did you learn to talk like this?"

"Get to it," James suggested, pushing him down into his mouth. 

He suckled at Mallory's cock first, starting with something that was not unfamiliar, even if the position was. Mallory jerked against his hands so, overwhelmed, but James held him by the hips. There would be bruises about Mallory's hips, and James meant to kiss them in the morning when he woke. 

"James, I can't, not like this," Mallory whispered, graceless as his legs gave out and his cock slipped deep into James's throat. 

It was a good thing, James decided, that he was getting better at breathing through his nose when sucking cock. Mallory's apologies were frantic as he pulled out, and his hands came to wipe away spit and sweat and pre-ejaculate from James's face. 

"I tell you when you can move away," James said, catching his hands and pinning them behind him. "Now hold your hands behind your neck, unless you want me to tie them back with my belt." 

"James, I will hurt you like this," Mallory murmured anxiously, obeying nevertheless, and he was so heartbreakingly beautiful in the candlelight as he did James's bidding. 

"Stick to the logistics of candles, dearheart," James told him, laughing. "Leave the sex to me." That earned him a censorious frown, but James dragged him down again, and this time, he stuck his tongue straight up into Mallory's arse. 

It was a good thing that the wood panelling of Mallory's bedroom acted as excellent sound insulation. The guards would have come running upstairs, guns at the mark, if not for that. Let him scream. James wanted his voice raw and shredded by the end of this night. 

Mallory tasted like contradictions even there, at the core of him, a mixture of his earthy musk and the milled rosemary and thyme sheep's milk Icelandic soap he liked for the long baths on his days off. James tugged him down until he settled, until he stopped trying to lift away, until his thighs bracketed James completely, leaving him exposed and with nowhere to escape to, at James's mercy, just as James was at his. James teased him open, with long, rough licks, until he quieted into shuddering breaths. Every breath of him fluttered him more open on James's tongue, aiding in his ruin. When James began suckling him, he screamed again, and James was glad for how vocal his pleasure was, because his own arousal was flagging at the rough scars inside Mallory, left behind from the live wires they must have stuck in him to torture. He must have been grievously injured. How long had he bled? How long had he screamed? How long had he struggled to walk? James had no faith in Gods. He had never had faith in anyone, except M, and even then it had been grudging, with good reason. 

"James, please," Mallory was babbling above him, pleasured out of his mind, so close to orgasm. James could feel the tell-tale tremors about his tongue. Mallory was not in Ireland. James was not going to ruin this for him with his reaction. He shifted his hand to loop loose about the base of Mallory's cock, and staved off the orgasm Mallory was entering the throes of.

"James!" 

James could get drunk on that sordid desperation. He chose to settle where he was, eating Mallory out, letting him dance between tongue and hand, teetering denied on the edge of release. He felt his own orgasm overtake him, like a tide, just as he had been helpless when he had been caught up in Vesper's pleasure once. He shoved aside the tiredness, and focused on his task. 

When he was confident that Mallory had no words coherent left, and could not even plead James's name as if it were a prayer self-contained, he took his hand off and nipped at the warm flesh above him that was opened to his tongue in quivering surrender. 

He could not blame Mallory for collapsing, an exhausted burden of sweat and spend and shaking limbs. 

"What about you?" Mallory asked, as soon as he regained a semblance of coherence. 

"You were enough," James said truthfully, dragging his spend from across his stomach and thighs to daub it on Mallory's lips, and James could not help grin at how Mallory licked his fingers clean without indecision, too tired to overthink the gesture as he normally might. 

He dragged Mallory prone upon him, and smiled when Mallory summoned the energy to press his nose into James's neck. 

Mallory's weight upon him was both light and heavy. 

"Happy birthday," he murmured. 

"It was. Thank you," James said, kissing the corner of Mallory's lips. 

"You had decided not to fuck me tonight, hadn't you? Cunning bastard. I will be cross with you tomorrow."

"I doubt it," James teased him. "You are easily distracted by certain placements of my tongue, as we observed at length today." 

"Kiss me goodnight."

"My mouth was in your arse." 

"James." 

James kissed him properly, and Mallory fell asleep half-way through the kiss. It was hard to be offended by that, James decided, smiling at the candles and the damned roses. 

_Roses_. Somewhere, he knew M was laughing her head off at the utter travesty that his life had become. 

Forty-fucking-two, with a desk job. And he did not want to die.

\----

James cleared his probation and got the desk job he wanted. It came with an office, equipped with the most uncomfortable furniture. 

Three months later, Eve came to his office, decked in Christmas red and green. Why did she look so smug? James raised his brows.

"Paperwork disclosure about workplace relationships for employees that have cleared probation," she said cheerfully, dumping a thick folder before him. "You have to take the quiz and pass it with at least a 90% score on it."

What was the use of fucking his boss if all it meant was more paperwork? It was noon. Q was getting them sushi. Mallory was likely asleep still, snug in his bed. James had woken up at five, stumbled downstairs to make himself tea and toast, showered and dressed in haste, and headed to work. 

"How did Mallory convince the government that three days of eighteen hours each make the ideal workweek for the head of MI6?" 

"The stubbornness comes in handy, I must say," Eve said wryly. "His temperament isn't necessarily conducive to negotiations, as I am sure you have noticed." 

James had noticed. Mallory was not institutionalized yet, for all that he played at being a bureaucrat. He was fucking glad, once again, that he had decided to stay in London. Mallory was ill-suited for the thankless death warrant that was MI6. 

"Sushi is here!" Q shouted, opening the door. "I hope I didn't interrupt amorous relations," he said, cheerful and sexually frustrated, as was his default. 

"There isn't a single item of furniture here that can bear a vigorous fucking," James told him. "No gentleman would inflict such discomfort on a lady." 

"I think M furnished your room knowing you," Q replied. "Eve, Tanner and I all have better furniture." 

James knew Mallory well enough to be sure that he had not picked the furniture. Mallory likely did not even know that IKEA existed. This bore Tanner's mark. Tanner was cheap, when it came to James. If asked, he would say it was merely a pin drop against the cars James had blown up over the years.

"Is that the office relations paperwork?" Q whistled, noticing the documents on James's table. "Dear Lord, you are fucking M, aren't you?"

"Not if he doesn't score at least 90% on the test on workplace relationship conduct," Eve sassed. "I am off to find Tanner. Did you get the extra wasabi for him?"

"Course I did," Q muttered, staring at James as if the Revelation was written on his face. "Bond, you dog!" 

"Don't carry on about that," James said sharply. Mallory was not against anyone knowing, James was sure, but James knew that it was dangerous. Mallory had many enemies, and he was oblivious to most of them. 

"You have to tell me," Q demanded, demeanor changing to cold seriousness. "He needs to be protected, Bond, and I can't do it right if you keep your secrets when it comes to him. M died because of secrets."   
  
"I didn't keep her fucking secrets from you," James rejoined, furious at the reminder, at the castigation he deserved and loathed. 

"You are keeping Mallory's secrets from me," Q said calmly. "I need to know to keep him safe, Bond. You cannot kill his enemies, not at the rate he makes them. He needs my protection. I won't have him killed on my watch."   
  
"Who he fucks changes nothing," James said softly, hating how a flicker of fear flashed in Q's gaze at his tone.

"It does, Bond, when it is you. Your lovers tend to wind up dead."

"Sushi!" Eve called out. Q cleared his throat and held James's gaze, unwilling to back down. 

"There is infiltration in his security detail," James offered finally, knowing that Q was his ally in this, even if he struggled to trust another with Mallory's safety. He had tried to keep M safe all by himself, and look where that had ended. He was not enough, not anymore. "Denbigh's people have been following him. They know." 

"You knew," Q said, as soon as he laid his eyes on Eve in Tanner's office where their sushi waited. He turned to Turner. "You knew too! I need to know to keep him safe!" 

"I was not sure," Tanner defended himself. "Bond has not slept with a man before, to the best of my knowledge. The way he looked at M during the birthday party, however-"

Had he been so obvious? Tanner had the benefit of having known him for two decades. That must be it. 

"Now that we know, let us keep M safe," Eve said, placating. 

As James reached for a piece of tempura, his cell rang. Edith. He excused himself and returned to his office. 

"Yes, Edith?"

"Mr. Bond, apologies for calling you during the work hours," she said quietly. "I had a premonition." 

She had a premonition, she had told Mallory, right before he had enlisted in the Air Force. James reached for his coat. 

"Can you save the number I give you, Edith?" 

He gave her Q's number. He was unspeakably relieved, he found, that Q had finally found out. James knew only to attack. Q knew to defend.   
  
\---- 

  
\---- 

He rushed to Kensington. The guards were at their post. He nodded to them, and walked in, giving nothing away, his hand ready on his gun. Mallory was in his usual armchair, reading his cricket magazine peacefully. 

"James?" He asked, taking everything in, quietly worried. 

The phone in the dining room rang then. 

"Stay," James warned him, and hurried to the phone. 

It was Denbigh, apologetic. 

"I imagine he must be indisposed, Mr. Bond. How the news must have crushed him, stirred his dark memories of a grim time that he must not have expected to outlast!" 

"What are you talking about?" James asked the cunt. 

"Turn on the television, Mr. Bond. It might be educational."

Mallory was staring at his cellphone, eyes wide, face pale.

"There was a leak," he said softly, looking up at James. "In the MI5. Classified information from the IRA archives. It is on Youtube and on the torrents. They cannot pull the videos down fast enough before a hundred more crop up. The journalists were alerted today. It is on the news."

James wanted to go to him, but he looked so fragile and James was afraid to touch him lest he shattered. 

"I should tell my parents, before they find out in a less delicate manner," Mallory muttered, picking up his phone, scanning the contacts list. 

James took a deep breath and walked over to him. 

"Yes?" 

"Visit them, Gareth. They needn't find out over a phone call."

Mallory frowned. He said flatly, "I am not welcome there, James. Even if I were, I would not want to. If it were up to them, I would be still in a sanatorium. It was no easy task, escaping the madhouse six months after a bloody long convalescence after crawling back from Ireland to friendly fire."

Ah, there it was, the rift that had broken them. James did not know what to say. 

"I can accompany you." 

James wondered why he offered something as inconsequential and meaningless. What did James know of families? 

"James-"

"You can refuse," James promised him. "This isn't a deal. I am offering you my support, without any conditions attached."

Something in his tone must have conveyed his solemnity. Mallory hesitated and finally nodded agreement. 

"It is difficult," he admitted quietly, refusing to meet James's gaze for once. "You can tease me that I need my hand held, but you wouldn't be wrong." 

"If you want your hand held, I will hold your hand. You are owed your weaknesses, dearheart," James told him gently, hating that Mallory, of all people on this green earth, faulted himself for a lack of courage. 

"You called me that, once before," Mallory remarked, a smile touching his lips despite everything. 

"You bought me fucking roses," James said mildly. "I think I can permit myself an endearment or two." 

"I shan't complain," Mallory promised, though James would not have believed him even if he had complained. His face was transformed so by joy when James called him dear. 

"Get your coat, then, and your gun. Time to meet your parents."

James texted Q when Mallory went to fetch his gun. 

Q's reply was immediate. _"You should watch the videos before they summon you to the investigation tribunals. They are extremely disturbing. Don't watch them alone. Come to my office when you are ready."_

"Send Eve over to Mallory's for the evening," James texted back.   
  
\--- 

"Mr. Bond," Edith greeted him. Her eyes were on her son, their depths so full of love and grief. 

"Edith, who is it?" 

Mallory had inherited his height from his father. Everything else was from his mother. 

"Come on in," Simon offered, and it was painful to see how greedy and desperate he was as he took in the sight of his son at his door. His hand went to his wife's shoulder as if to anchor himself in reality. "Please come on in." 

James hated giving away himself before others, in public. Denbigh's people were still following them, he knew. And yet, he could not help himself from placing his palm at Mallory's back, nudging him forward. He felt the spine beneath his hand loosen its tension ever so slightly. 

Mallory would be the death of him.

Edith and Simon seemed equally as lost as their son once they were inside, standing in their drawing room. James half-expected them to start wringing their hands. Mallory, ever so brave, even when it cost him everything, especially when it cost him everything, stepped forward. 

"Mummy, Daddy, this is James. He works at the MI6. He is my lover." 

James froze where he stood, taken aback by the introduction. He had agreed to accompany Mallory without giving a thought to how the man would introduce him to his parents. He was forty-fucking-two, with a desk job, and his boss was introducing him to his parents as his lover. James did not think he had been introduced to a lover's parents before, except in the occasional case of seducing some terrorist's daughter for the country's sake. 

Edith's eyes were wide. She had known, of course she had known from the first time James had visited her. She had not expected Mallory to introduce James as his lover. 

"Thank you for bringing our son back to us," Simon said, extending his hand to James. 

James shook his hand and murmured something polite. What else could he do? 

"There has been a leak at the Home Office," Mallory continued, having had his fun at their expense with the introductions. "The IRA archives. There are some graphic videos of my time in their cells. You should stay clear of the news until they fade off primetime."

"The IRA sent us a tape every day while they had you, without missing a day in between but for Easter Sunday," Simon said quietly. "We watched them all, despite the content, because they told us that if you were alive at the end of each video, that meant you would live another day. And we needed to know. We needed to know if you lived."

Mallory was so still, as still as he had been when he had first received the text about the leak. James feared for him, for how faraway his gaze turned, distant and inward, as if transported to Ireland all over again. 

"On Easter, we did not receive a tape. They sent us your beret instead. We buried an empty coffin that day."

"They bathed me and served me a full meal on Easter," Mallory whispered. "There was a priest, and he gave me the sacrament. The Lord would have wanted it, they said. Mercy for the enemy, supper for the hungry, water for the thirsty. I could not swallow a bite without swallowing blood."

He was visibly trembling. James wanted to take him in his arms. Edith was reaching out too, her hand on Mallory's sleeve. Mallory gently shook her arm off. 

"I came to warn you about the unpleasantness," he said. "I will call, should anything change. We should be leaving now. We have a security leak to triage."

His eyes flicked over to the large portrait mounted over the fireplace, of him in his twenties, in his uniform, smiling so brightly at the camera. James ached for him so. 

"I was easier to love then," Mallory confessed, as they walked back home together. 

"I wouldn't have known how to," James said truthfully. The innocence Mallory had then would have scalded him. 

"How can I complain?" Mallory wondered, smiling, touched, and James would have given anything to kiss him right there on the high street, in the bright winter daylight. 

Eve was at home, waiting for them. 

"Thank you," Mallory murmured, clasping James's arm, as he crossed the threshold. 

" _Thank you,_ " Edith texted James. 

James bit back a wry smile; like mother, like son.   
\----

Q was in his office, focused on his coding. He had a pot of tea on, and James's laptop waited ready, with noise cancelling headphones at hand. 

James knew how torture worked. He had experienced it, directly and indirectly. He did not know, he had not known, how it affected him when it was his heart.

It was standard procedure, as M would have termed it. The IRA torturers had a methodology in how they set about breaking their prisoner. They had started with physical torture, and then with discomfort and deprivation, and then had moved to extreme sensory stimuli, and finally to mutilation. 

James knew how the wounds had scarred and healed, on every pock and patch of skin, on every knit together bone and ligament. Mallory's family had the means to see him mended. This had been beyond the taxpayer-funded benefits that the government offered. Mallory's parents had not settled for what Silva had settled for. He had not been rank and file, merely a last name in government bookkeeping. James supposed, if he had been ordinary, the IRA would not have dedicated their considerable ingenuity to his breaking, that he would not have needed to be mended at all. 

"Standard procedures," James said, and hated how his fingers shook. 

"Yes," Q allowed. "I think they have other material, Bond." He frowned in thought. "Their torrent accounts have continued to be active in the seeds." Q swirled his non-exploding pen. "Not the youtube accounts, however. I suspect the next set of leaks are criminal in international and domestic jurisdictions."

Signal Intercepts allowed MI6 to frame domestic terrorism by tracking down any potential international nexus, thus bringing the matter into MI6 jurisdiction from MI5 and the Home Office.

"Fucker!" Q said then, staring at James with newfound respect. "You picked that desk job because you knew!"

"Medical," James guessed. "Mallory's hospitalization must have been in the States. His parents spent a few years there. Denbigh must have his medical records and mental health records." Mallory had said that he had to escape a mental health sanatorium, and it was the most shaken James had seen the man. "I am going to talk to Felix."

\-----  
"They want him to resign, James," Felix explained. "Everyone, really. Your boss seems to be making enemies left and right with his adamance to not let MI6 merge into Nine Eyes." 

Mallory's psychological records would not stand the test of public scrutiny, James suspected. The scandal would not permit the government to keep him on. How could they keep on a man diagnosed with mental health conditions as the head of MI6? He would be asked to quietly retire, or forced to a long and exhausting medical trial with the verdict written for him beforehand. 

The leaks from the IRA archives were merely meant to bring Mallory to the public eye. The journalists would now start digging. The second round was on the torrents, not on the Youtube accounts. It was meant to be found by the investigative journalists, not for easy consumption by the general public. When the news reached the general public finally, it would be biased and opinionated, and their minds would be already made up for them, to call for Mallory to resign, with all the virulent strength of mob justice on Twitter and other social media. That he was sleeping with James would add another layer of scandal, even if there was no employment rule they were violating. Denbigh could easily drag in M's death, and Skyfall, and burn MI6 to the ground along with Mallory's career and reputation. Nine Eyes would not mind that outcome.

James's cell rang. It was Denbigh. 

"You should tell him to stand down, Mr. Bond," Denbigh said kindly. "He is a good man. It is a pity he is not cut out for our world. You and I know where this will end. He seems more likely to eat a bullet than hang himself, though I imagine the Thames in the winter is a strong prospect too." 

Mallory had tried to take his own life before. The rift in his family and why they had committed him to the sanatorium took on a darker meaning. 

"You and I know that he will not go without fighting," James told Denbigh. "There is a reason you called me. What do you want?"

"I have a chartered plane waiting for you at Stansted, on New Year's Eve." Denbigh paused meaningfully. "Take him with you. Dubrovnik is warmer than Skyfall." 

\-----

\-----

They convened in Tanner's office. 

"M is at the MI5," Eve informed them. "Interviews." 

Interrogation. James knew they must be making him watch every video that had leaked, to verify that the content had not been tampered with, to identify the torturers, to answer their questions on which one of them might harbor personal or political vendetta.   
  
"I reconstructed his medical history in institutional settings - the airforce hospital in Herefordshire, Saint Barts, a clinic in Geneva, and a private facility in upstate New York."

"A facility?" Eve asked.

The sanatorium. 

"A long-term residential facility for patients with complex and untreatable psychiatric conditions," Q said. 

Eve snorted. James agreed. Mallory's sole untreatable psychiatric condition was his bloody stubbornness.

The MI5 would not dare pressure Mallory, not when he had his posting at MI6 still. Nevertheless, every impulsive tell or speech would be flagged in his file. When the next set of leaks arrived, they would retroactively corroborate with whatever flimsy notes they had from these interviews to arrive at convenient and predetermined conclusions. 

"005 reported," Q continued. "He had information from the States. The long-term residential facility was shut down and deregistered twenty days after M went missing."

Escaped, Mallory had said. 

"How many patients did they have on their premises?"

"Twenty. All were counter-terrorism or security services elite personnel, working for the organizations that are now in the final stages of the Nine Eyes talks. The paper trail vanishes there for the others. 005 is investigating."

005 was from Leeds, and the best field investigation agent they had. M had not shown him the same latitude she had given James. M had her circles of trust. She trusted her orphans the most. Mallory seemed to treat his subordinates with a semblance of fairness and equality. What did he know of squeezing blood from stone? 

"Who is Denbigh?" Eve asked. 

James had been investigating for weeks.

"Debt, covered up murders, and blackmail," Tanner said flatly. "He is an agent for someone else, a face for the operation." He took a deep breath. "I don't think it is merely ousting M that they want." 

No, that was evident. They wanted the MI6 leaderless. M's death, James had begun suspecting, as he replayed her last video to him, had been born of the same dark goal. It should have been the end of the MI6, after her twenty year tenure, given that the MI6 was synonymous with her, given that she had no protege trained to follow her. She had been a lone wolf, and everyone had known that. Her subordinates' loyalty was tethered to her. Replacing her had become impossible. Her death should have spelled the end of them, the single point of failure that she had made herself into. 

Nobody had expected Mallory to consolidate loyalty as effectively and quickly as he had.   
  
Q's earpiece activated. He frowned, processing the information he was receiving, and summarized, "The Mallorys found the New York facility through a skiing friend of Edith Mallory's colleague at the bar. He was killed a year ago in Austria." Q looked at Tanner and Bond. "He has had a previous run with the MI6. We knew him as Mr. White."

He had shot White in the leg at Lake Como, for Vesper. It had done nothing for Vesper or for James. 

"Silva turned on us after torture and rehabilitation. No matter his motivations, he had aid, he had been influenced. Someone in his position would not have had the means to rebuild his health and fortune without a sponsor," Tanner said, following along James's line of thought. 

"The New York facility must have been an indoctrination centre for highly trained special security service personnel, affected by trauma, to remold them to suit this organization's agenda," Q analyzed, tying it all together. 

Soldiers, arms and armaments, and cannon fodder were easy to procure. Generals, on the other hand, needed to possess blind faith, so that they would not usurp the mastermind, and ruthless competence, so that they would be able to operate a terrorist organization at scale. Recruiting from the ranks of the special security forces singling out those mentally vulnerable to influence was an excellent strategy, the same strategy that M had followed with the orphans. 

"M is leaving the MI5 offices. His driver says that they are being followed." 

Intimidation tactics meant to stress and distract. It was three in the morning.

"Kensington?"

"He is coming here," Q muttered, shaking his head. 

\---- 

  
Mallory's eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of cigarettes. He smoked only when he was under unmanageable stress. James supposed he had held up admirably under the turmoil, and holding a pack of cigarettes against him would be unsporting. 

Eve had no such compunction. "Your coat is going to stink of smoke and you have a tribunal in six hours."

He let her fuss about and take his coat, to rush it to the dry cleaners. 

"I don't think it will matter," he offered finally, when she came back. The calm he exuded scared James. "They have a great deal of other compelling evidence that smoking may not feature at all in their analysis of my psychoses."

Q poured him a cup of tea. Tanner frowned at him. 

"I will be in my office. I need to prepare a statement for the tribunal," Mallory said, nodding his thanks for the tea. 

  
\--- 


	4. The charge of the light brigade

  
When he entered Mallory's office, he suppressed a sigh at the sight of the man with his head in his hands, in the dull light of the street lamps below that filtered through the shades. 

Mallory flicked on his desk lamps. And his eyes held genuine surprise when he saw the takeaway James had brought. 

"My days are numbered and you continue to scheme to hook me on questionable culinary delights," Mallory jested, reaching his hand into the basket of wings. He dragged a finger through the spicy peri-peri sauce and he made a noise of pleased surprise when he brought it to his tongue. 

"I will have to bring you the garlic wings next time," James said. 

"He must have called you by now," Mallory said then, as if discussing the minutiae of daily life over a bucket of wings, as any other couple in the city winding down from a long day. "Kidnapping? Emotional blackmail?"

Forty-fucking-two and James had a death sentence who had discovered chicken wings at his birthday party. How was he to survive Mallory? 

"Does it matter?" James asked finally, after a long minute of silence. "You don't seem particularly inclined to tolerate a spot of kidnapping for your own good."

Mallory's parents had acted on his behalf, making decisions for his good. Look where that had taken them. Vesper had acted to save James. M had kept her secrets until they had been clawed away from her, and even then she had had the guts to demand James go on a mission to kill, ordering him from her bloody grave. 

James could save Mallory by doing what Denbigh demanded. He had tried to save M, back when he had been full of hubris. He was not going to take Mallory away from the MI6, where Q and Tanner and Eve and a six-hundred strong organization watched out for him. 

_When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered._

So be it; their charge of the light brigade. 

James had been grieving for his heart from the first time he had kissed Mallory. He had known, instinctively, even back then that there would be no fate merciful. Mallory's life might not be James's to save. He would be Mallory's justice instead. 

"You are not going to drag me to safety," Mallory murmured, shocked, touched, and love had never blazed fiercer in his eyes. 

"I know you shan't resign, not under duress," James replied, looking away from the undeniable, undeserved truth of it. 

"If you asked me to, James. There is nothing I can deny you." 

Mallory let James wipe his oily hands and mouth clean with his kerchief. 

"I will collect on your inability to deny me some other day," James teased him. "You can rest assured that it will be a more salacious demand than asking you to resign a desk job."

Mallory's laughter was light, and James had heard no music lovelier. It did not seem to matter then that Mallory had to appear before a parliamentary tribunal in four hours, not when they had this just for themselves.

James wished that Mallory did not have to summon the others. 

"Bill should prepare my statement, I think. I am too tired to give a damn, and I should give a damn about what I say tomorrow, if only because it is not merely my job on the line," Mallory hesitated. "You should be mindful to separate the institution's legacy from mine, so that any fallout is attributable to a reach of personal ambition and miscalculation." 

James realized why Mallory did not want to write the statement himself. How could he bring himself to write of his fictional neuroses that were now facts in intelligence dossiers? He would read out whatever Tanner wrote, faithfully, serving his role to ensure MI6 had a chance to remain untarnished. 

Tanner was not pleased, to say the least. Eve looked furious. Q had no patience for politics and said, "Why didn't you inform us that the videos were tampered with?"

"They were not," Mallory said, surprised. 

"Did they spawn new seeds?" Eve asked.

James got to his feet, exultant, and Q had the same jubilant glee on his face. "They made a mistake, Eve. They modified the unlisted youtube videos."  
  
"How long do we have?"

"My car arrives at seven," Mallory replied. "There are nearly twenty hours of material. Can we identify the most likely segments, Q?"

"Probabilistically," Q replied. "I will sample the material. If we find a tampered segment, I can run a prediction module to select other segments that may have been tampered." 

"Assuming it wasn't randomly altered," Tanner noted. 

"Unlikely," Eve disagreed. "They are confident in today's verdict."

The coffin was nailed shut. There had been no need to drive another nail in. They had become sloppy in their haste to see Mallory gone. 

"James," Mallory held him back, on their way to Q's office. He had never seen Mallory so ashamed outside sex. James closed the door and waited. 

"Would it matter if I gave you my gun?" Mallory asked quietly, paled by strong emotion, and yet so brave as he met James's gaze. 

James was not a man of faith, of placing faith in himself or in others, until then, as Mallory offered him power over his easiest means of doing away with himself, merely to set James at ease. 

So this is what faith was, James thought, and hated the dissonant shred of pain as it nestled fierce into his breast. 

"If you truly wanted to kill yourself, I would rather that you had a gun." 

Vesper had locked herself in a sinking cell and her face had been blue and swollen, grotesque, when he had found her. 

Mallory did not know that tale. He was perceptive, frighteningly so, and he said quietly, "I don't plan to. If I am forced to, I will bargain whatever I have to ensure you don't find me first."

"I know you are not suicidal," James offered. 

"In Geneva. The psychologist was trying to get me to flip. I pretended, well enough to infiltrate the lower ranks of their intelligence organisation. _Stavro_. I found a name, and I tried to get back to London, to the SAS, to alert them. I was inexperienced in international intelligence operations. They caught me. My parents were in Geneva then. I had to slit my wrists when they visited me at the clinic." 

He covered his face with his palms and exhaled. 

"My father had a stroke. My mother brought him back to London. She had legal custody of me, since I was evaluated a danger to myself. I was sent to New York, on the recommendation of the same friend of one of my mother's colleagues." 

"It was remote, up in the mountains. I did not meet the other patients. Their best psychologists worked on me all day and night. There was no physical torture, but the isolation, the continual and systematic indoctrination, and the mind-altering medications easily overwhelmed my head. They knew, and I knew, that I was so close to the edge of becoming theirs. I met Stavro then. He was Polish. A corpulent man with a siamese cat. He was so taken with me. He said I was the protege he had been looking for, for years. He had been an arms supplier to the IRA. He had been tracking me for months, and complimented me on how I had escaped the IRA, body in tatters and mind intact, and how I had still found the pluck to infiltrate his organization in Geneva."

"I knew there was no escaping them. I tried to kill myself a few times. I was put into a padded room, and they took away all that I could have repurposed to off myself. They told me, each time I tried and failed, that they had informed my mother of my latest futile attempt." 

"The IRA had heard of Stavro's interest in me," Mallory continued, speaking fast as if he was relieved, finally, to yield the secrets he had carried alone, as if frightened that James might ask him to stop. "They did not want me in his ranks. My resoluteness of temperament had then a measure of notoriety in their circles. Stavro had a reputation for taking on insurgency movements for the right price. Some of the more moderate sections of the IRA knew their days of war were numbered and that politics was their chance to achieve their objectives. They extracted me from New York, at great cost, and smuggled me via Mexico, to a port in Honduras. From there, they sailed me to Venezuela, and the IRA paid the cartels to deliver me to London. My father's friends saw me rehabilitated in the government ranks. I was debriefed by the Foreign office and the Home office. Nothing came of their classified investigations into Stavro, I assume. I moved through the echelons of the administration, and you know the rest of my tale." Mallory smiled wanly. "Later, when I led the peace talks delegation to Belfast, the IRA leaders spoke of how I had been their most costly prisoner." 

Mallory had spoken of highly classified matters that he did not have any clearance to share. Standard procedure required James to alert MI5. Mallory had been willing to surrender his gun to James.

_So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,_  
_I see thee what thou art, and know_  
_Thy likeness to the wise below,_  
_Thy kindred with the great of old._

James cupped his face and stroked a thumb across Mallory's cold brow, heart aching at how Mallory exhaled long in tiredness and leaned into James's palm, as a long-lost pilgrim finding safe haven. 

"To Q's, come now," James barked, hating to take away the brief glimpse of consolation Mallory had finally found. "We don't have the time for this."

Mallory did not lash out defensively. That was James's way, not his. 

Instead, he followed along, and said with his usual fucking sincerity that gut-punched James every time, "I wish I did not have to watch those videos with you beside me. I was frightened out of my wits and screamed for my mother every day. Everyone who works for me here has shown more strength in darker situations."

"You were not trained to withstand guerrilla torture," James pointed out, offering rationality instead of taking him into his arms as he badly wanted to. He could not; they were not at home.

\-----

Mallory leaned against Q's wall and watched the large screen, stoic and composed. Eve and Tanner were composing the statement to be read at the tribunal. James sat down to help Q sample the material. 

Forty minutes in, he raised a hand to have Q freeze the video. 

"Yes?" 

"They changed the pitch of the scream, lowered it by a clef," Mallory said, perplexed. Q played it again, frowning. 

"With respect, M, all of them sound like a man being butchered," Eve sassed, trying to set Mallory at ease. 

"Run it through the pitch analyser," Q ordered James. 

Sure enough, they had dropped the shattering high F of the screams by a clef. 

They slogged through the sampled material, until Mallory stopped them again, pointed at the large man who had buried a blunt axe in his chest in that frame, crushing his breastbone, and said, "He did not have the tattoo on the back of his neck." 

Q scanned it through the systems, in multiple permutations, until he looked up at them in tired victory, and said, "There is a hit in the Mossad database. Spectre, an organization led by a Polish-Greek man whose name is unknown. An occasional supplier of arms to the Palestine Liberation Army. He is referred to as _Number 1_ in the Mossad archives." 

"Stavro," Mallory said then, staring at the video frame, at the tentacled tattoo on the back of his torturer's neck. "Look for Stavro." 

"That is Rory McKendall. I need you to go to Portlaoise for me," he said, shifting his gaze to James. 

Portlaoise, where leaders from the dissident paramilitary wings of the IRA, were held prisoners. They were a terrorist organization as classified by the UK government. 

"Use my name," Mallory continued, with a wry grin. "It will get you their attention." 

"Have your gun on you at all times," James said in parting. 

He knew that Mallory understood what he could not say; of faith, and where James had found his.

He glanced over at Eve. She nodded solemnly. _Take the bloody shot_. He did not have to tell her that. 

Q tossed him his communication gear, and James threw him a wink to ease his frowning, tired face. Q was too young to be jaded so. He got an eyeroll for his compassion. 

James made for Portlaoise without looking back at Mallory. He had to trust that Mallory could hold the line with the MI5 and with Denbigh, that Eve was sufficient protection, that Q could follow the threads of Spectre through the conduits of foreign and domestic intelligence. 

\----

James had shot White, for Vesper. He wanted to bury an axe in Rory McKendall's skull, cleave him open from head to heel. The ceiling lights flickered above them, as they looked at each other through the visitor view panel.

"Mallory sent you." 

"New tattoo?" James asked him. The tentacles touched the sides of McKendall's thick neck. 

"He could never resist the curiosity," McKendall said, beady eyes full of malice steeped in old grudges of forefathers. "Tell him that he won't make it back, if he gets involved in this."

"That is rather vague, isn't it?"

"I know who you are, Mr. Bond."

"Incoming drone, target locked on McKendall, fourteen minutes," Q murmured in his ear. The ceiling light flickered again. Guided sensing. 

James looked at the flimsy partition, constructed specifically for this meeting. Portlaoise had a longstanding tradition of officer betrayal and military oppression. 

"How was it, McKendall?" He taunted, thinking of White again. "Did they make you kneel with a shoe on your neck to hold you down when they carved that on your skin?"

That is what he had done to Mallory, with a large shoe on his slender throat and another on his thigh, pinning him down, cutting off his air supply. Mallory had not a man's form then, cusped on youth, with musculature torn away by pain and starvation. His eyes had been the same, and they had looked up at McKendall, and watched the deed done unto him even as he screamed, and beheld the man until he had marked every scar and mark, to know that there had been no tattoo then. 

McKendall laughed darkly and replied, "You will wish he had died then at my hands, Bond." 

M had not thought that she would die, that Silva would kill her. Silva had not been able to kill her. She had died and he had mourned her before James had. _I got one thing right_ , she had told James with her last breath. 

"Eleven," Q said. 

James got to his feet and threw the chair at the ceiling lights, tripping the wires. Guard sirens activated, caterwauling. He heard running, running away from them. McKendall smashed the partition, ponderous and grim, and James caught him in the stomach with a sharp punch. He heard Q swearing in his ear. McKendall caught him by the waist and flung him into the metal door that barred them from the stone corridors of the prison. The old wound smarted. _Take the shot_. He got to his feet again and charged the mountainous man; Mallory's bone had gleamed white as it had been split open, manubrium to gladiolus. There was blood in James's mouth when McKendall's fist hit him in the neck. He swayed, lightheaded in pain, as McKendall caught him by his tie and looped it around his neck. 

"I could have snapped his throat, the delicate thing that he was," McKendall said, breathless. He was strong, but prison had weakened him. James spun around, and drove his heel into McKendall's groin, sharp and furious. The brute did not even flinch, and caught him by the leg and twisted him once again with the makeshift noose he had. Q was shouting something in his ear, but James could not hear, as his legs convulsed mid-air as he fought for oxygen. Vesper had died like this, gasping until she had gone blue in the face. He scrambled to fetch his knife from his boot and stuck it into McKendall's neck, right where the tracker was, over the fourth cervical vertebra. 

"You fucking-" 

The first explosion triggered outside in the corridor threw them apart then. McKendall was strong, and had forgotten how to fall lightly. He was still rolling onto his back as James struggled to his feet and leapt onto the man, dragging the knife up, slicing the tracker out into a bloody palm as McKendall screamed. 

"He screamed and you mocked him for it." His spittle sprayed blood on McKendall's head. The ceiling cracked at the next explosion. 

"You can't protect him by killing me," McKendall gurgled, his throat bleeding into his lungs. 

"I have to begin somewhere," James replied. And smashed the knife deep down the carotid artery to clavicle. McKendall was struggling still, in vain, and his screams had turned inhuman. 

"Two minutes," Q said, hushed. "Don't end him until the drone changes from inert navigation to deploy. I need the detonator activation signal to retrace it."

James had plenty to discuss with McKendall in two minutes. He straddled the man and pulled his fingers to the side, and plucked the knife out of his neck to pin his wrist. 

"Morse code, since you seem to have lost your voice," James told him. "You could resist, but I suspect you shan't." 

He had seen the likes of McKendall over his career in Her Majesty's Secret Service. They did better at the torturing than at being tortured. 

"When did Stavro contact you first?"

James dug the knife deeper, slicing down to the ulnar. 

He left McKendall with thirty seconds to spare, when Q confirmed that he had the signal he needed. 

\---- 

  
"McKendall had been Spectre's spy within the IRA, charged with shaping Mallory into the right frame of mind. He had clung to old grudges, and hated that Stavro did not care about the Good Friday Agreement. Took matters into his own hands, or tried to, and got thrown into the prison by his old comrades who sold him to the government. Denbigh put a contract out for him, at Stavro's behest, when he realized that you were at Portlaoise. He rushed to his toymakers in Switzerland and got a drone hit issued." Q paused in his debriefing of their analysis. "Sloppy, last-minute. Launched from Ireland, instead of from within the UK." Q's grin was sharp. "Our jurisdiction, not MI5's." 

"I have dispatched 003 to White's contacts in Switzerland," Tanner said crisply, looking over their notes. 

He pressed his lips thin and looked up at James, just as he had when he had fetched James from Venice. Q had masked out the details of McKendall's last two minutes on earth. 

"I am heading to my flat," James said. He stank of blood and piss, his face and body were bruised blue, his clothes were a lost cause, and he was cold to the bones. "I will come back in three hours. Call me if you need me here earlier, Q." 

Eve had texted Q a few hours earlier, in the interim between the tribunal hearings.

"We have to wait until 003 communicates," Q said blankly. His face showed no emotion even though he knew what Tanner had realized from their mission summary. 

\---

There was a text from Edith waiting on James's phone. 

_Wish you both a Merry Christmas._

He ran up the stairs to his tiny flat. 

Mallory was waiting outside in the corridor, leaning against the door, dozing where he stood. James had never given him a copy of the keys. 

"I felt I must come here," Mallory murmured, startling awake when he felt James's hand on his shoulder, rubbing his tired eyes. "An odd flash of foreboding." 

"You look a sight. What happened?" His eyes sharpened in worry. "Do you need medical assistance, James?"

"Move," James said, his tongue heavy in his mouth, swollen and bruised. Mallory swore and plucked the keys from him, and got the door opened. He dragged James to the tiny shower stand, and hurriedly stripped him, wincing when he saw the colorful landscape of James's skin.

"I sent you to talk to him," Mallory said, barely restraining his anger as he saw the marks on James's throat from that makeshift noose.

"He is dead. I killed him. He was in a great deal of pain before he died. And it was not enough." James spat blood into the basin. He pissed into the toilet and winced at the blood in his urine. Mallory swore softly. He turned the shower on. There was no hot water. Of course, there wasn't. 

Mallory had stripped to his shirtsleeves. He flipped closed the toilet seat and pushed James to sit down. 

"I am going to heat some water and come back. Don't move." 

James raised an eyebrow at the teakettle Mallory brought back. 

"It isn't as if you have a plethora of vessels in your kitchen. Oh James, how do you keep house like this?" 

They both knew that James did not keep house in his flat. They had merely never discussed that they had lapsed into living together. M had thrown James out, when he had dared. 

Mallory sighed and knelt before him on the grimy bathroom tiles. His trousers would be ruined. 

"I couldn't find a clean towel," he murmured. "I brought one of your polos." He dipped the cloth in the kettle, and gently began mopping up blood and piss and grime from James's body. He had also brought one of the cheap bottles of vodka James had left to mock himself about the death he had not died, thanks to Mallory. 

"You had nothing else," Mallory was saying apologetically, daubing the cotton to the mouth of the bottle, wincing at the strong smell, and looking up at James for permission.

"You realize that your worries about my backsliding into flagrant alcoholism are as meaningful as my worries about your suicidal tendencies? You have no inclinations in that direction, and I don't want to drink a fucking drop again in my life because I _hit_ you."

The last time he had promised Mallory that he would not strike him again, it had been received with skepticism and resignation. 

"I have put that in the past, and so should you," Mallory remonstrated this time. "That was more than eight months ago." 

"That doesn't make it right," James said, and he realized he was tearing up. 

He had a black-eye, swollen, and he had killed McKendall, who had been a dead man walking, because he could not bear letting him die an easy death after what he had done to Mallory. He had struck Mallory too, twice, when Mallory could barely stand, when his sin had been only to save James's life. 

Mallory turned the shower on, stripped hastily and stepped in, making a face at the water temperature. Then he pulled James in, and held him tight, as James cried for his crime. How could Mallory look at him as if there was anything in him right then to salvage and to cherish? James was not graceful in this, in his hoarse coughing and hiccups, in his snot and tears. 

When his sobs subsided into gasps, Mallory turned the water off, and dragged them out. He dried James with a pillowcase, and bundled him onto the IKEA bed he kept, covering him with Mallory's winter coat. It was of lambswool, and smelled of him. Then he ran a hand through James's hair, sat beside him, and pressed a firm kiss to his forehead.

"I forgave you then," he confessed. "I was frightened, but I forgave you. You must understand that I was taken with you, from the day you walked into Mansfield's hearing to save her." 

_One equal temper of heroic hearts,_  
_Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will_  
_To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield._

"I was dwelling on her words, wondering if such mighty concepts could ever be embodied in a physical form, musing if poetry could find flesh, and I saw you rush in, as thunder and sunshine, to move earth and heaven. I saw you suffer, and abide, at Skyfall."

Mallory's face was soft as he looked down at James. 

"I loved the heroes as a boy. I loved the tales of homecoming, of _Nostos_ , their long travels and travails as they fought to come home, and then finding that home is not what it had been in their embers of hope that had carried them through darkness and storm."

And the irony of it, James thought, as he drank in Mallory's wistful admiration, when it had been Mallory who had clawed his way to be James's, a pilgrim foundering home from Ireland, from Geneva, from New York, working his way through the rungs of bureaucracy, until he came to the MI6, to take a bullet for a woman who hated his guts, to ride a helicopter to Skyfall for James. _Nostos_ \- he had come to the MI6 in the wake of M's death to find he had no home there; so he had made one, giving and giving so easily, weaning James away from drink and death, anchoring him to home and hearth and a desk job, with roses and candles and Tennyson, handing over the reins to himself without a flinch. 

"I don't regret how I killed McKendall," James said quietly, taking Mallory's hands in his and placing them on his chest, on his heart. "I am not the Odysseus of this tale, Gareth. I don't care to be, as long as I can serve your justice to Denbigh and Stavro and every single man who dared." 

"I was willing to go to great lengths to ensure you did not walk the earth to serve Mansfield's justice to her murderers. What makes you think that I will permit you to undertake that folly on my behalf?"

"Permit?" 

Mallory grinned at him, boyish and mischievous in his confidence that James would obey his whims. If his mouth wasn't full of blood, James would have kissed the smugness right off that beloved face.

\--- 

He heard Mallory speaking softly on the phone later to Q, explaining that James was resting, that their investigation could wait for the morning. 

James rolled his eyes at that and stumbled to his feet, shoving Mallory's coat at him and going to dress himself. Mallory had thrown on his clothes of the day before. 

"Well, it seems that he will arrive in thirty," Mallory said, and rung off his phone. "Q was insistent."

"With good reason. We are in the middle of a time-sensitive investigation that could well see you bundled off any moment in a lunatic cart to wherever Stavro wants you." 

"I have to attend the tribunal," Mallory said. "Try not to worsen your injuries, please."

The gall of him, after having ridden a helicopter to the arse end of Scotland in a storm with taped ribs and a bullet wound. James knew better than to start that argument. 

"Change your clothes first. You look as if you have been on your knees in the alley behind the Texaco in Hackney, giving blowjobs to drug-peddlers." 

"Comparing your bathroom linoleum to a Hackney alley?" Mallory asked, laughing, seeing joy where James saw only grief. 

"Go home and wash up," he told him instead of dragging him to the farthest corner of Falklands to keep him safe. "The sheep milk soap that smells like a herb garden in Provence."

"That is my unwinding from a workday routine," Mallory noted. "There is little unwinding expected today."

"Do it for me, dearheart."

Mallory said nothing to that, greatly pleased by the endearment as he ever was. As he plucked his coat and made to leave, James called after him, "Merry Christmas!" 

Mallory's surprised laughter lingered in the flat long after his steps had faded away. 

James grabbed his gun and gadgets, and rushed to the MI6 to meet Q. 

\-----

"Ernst Stavro Blofeld, male, seventy-five," Q said, when James closed the door behind him. "Graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Political History and Economics, and then from the Warsaw University of Technology with a degree in Engineering and Radionics. He was hired by the Polish Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs and appointed to a sensitive communication position, which he used for buying and selling stocks at the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Arms dealing during the Cold War made him rich. Now Spectre provides intelligence and paramilitary services for various governments in exile, international and domestic nationalist insurgence movements." 

"Last known location?" 

"Beirut, Christmas Eve," Q said, looking at his screen. "His private charter plane has filed a flight plan to Dubrovnik on New Year's Eve. 003 will move from Austria to Croatia tomorrow."

"Denbigh?"

"Current location is at M's tribunal. He is seated at Claire Dowar's right." Q grinned at him. "M signed the warrant yesterday, even before you stepped foot on Portlaoise." 

"Time to make a trip to Whitehall." James grinned back. 

"Careful. Denbigh is spooked by Portlaoise. He is armed tighter then a nun's cunt. He has ten to fifteen of his people in the tribunal room. More in the corridors." 

Mallory had MI6 guards fiercely loyal to him. He would be unarmed himself, as M had been in the same chamber. 

\-----

James snuck in, and found Mallory answering questions patiently, stoically, about his attempts to commit suicide, about his addiction to painkillers, about his psychological evaluations. The contempt for the line of questioning was evident in the expressions of those who had careers in the intelligence service. Nothing in Mallory's file was new to them. They had vetted him for the job, after all. There was titillation and surprise on the faces of the politicians the Security Services were accountable to. 

"Mr. Mallory. While we have the greatest sympathies for the suffering you underwent patriotically-" Denbigh said, eyes glittering in cruelty, "you must allow that your psychological history does not reflect well on your ability to succeed as the Director of MI6." 

"The SAS, MI5, and MI6 evaluators cleared me for this role. As is required of the Director of MI6, I subject myself to monthly re-evaluations, conducted by the MI6 psychiatric department. The MI6 chief medical officer, Dr. Gardiner, can speak to the test results."

"The documentation refers to your estrangement from your family." Denbigh clucked sympathetically. Mallory did not betray any emotion. 

"No wife, no children," Denbigh continued. 

Eve's eyes gave her wrath away. No stiff upper lip there, yet, for all that she had learned at M's knees. 

"The MI6 documentation states that for the past three months, you have been _involved_ with one of your subordinates." Denbigh's face portrayed his faux surprise so well. "I am glad to see that you have someone in your life, Mr. Mallory. No man is an island, et al. When much of our life is given to the service, it takes another that serves to understand."

James suppressed a flinch at Mallory's slow, controlled exhale. Denbigh knew, of course he knew, where Mallory's vulnerabilities lay. 

"Mr. Denbigh," Dowar began sharply. "Is there a purpose to this line of intrusive questioning?" 

"Mr. Mallory has unfortunately exhibited poor judgment in his choice of workplace fraternization. Mr. Bond was culpable in Mansfield's death, due to his rash decision making, as we all know from the last tribunal despite the valiant defense from Mr. Mallory that saw him acquitted from the charges leveled by MI5." Denbigh paused, letting silence accuse. "Mr. Bond broke into a secure facility in Ireland and murdered a man with callousness, with carelessness, secure in the knowledge that the MI6 that had shielded his excesses under Mansfield would continue to do so under Mallory. His career has shown that he is a loose cannon that serves only a single master, the Director of MI6. Mansfield let him serve though he had failed at least two successive evaluations. I am sure that the venerable tribunal shares my concern that biased decision-making will continue at the MI6, and an intimate relationship merely muddles the incentives further."

Denbigh leaned in, smiling gently at Mallory, with the eyes of a shark. "You must know, Mr. Mallory, that James Bond's illustrious career is built on seduction and manipulation. Can you state with certainty that your involvement is not rooted in your inexperience, and perhaps desire, to experience intimacy, and his exploitation of your tragedy?" 

Mallory had worn his pinstriped blues. James saw the silver cufflinks gleam at his wrists and he leaned forward to speak. Until Mallory, James had considered blacks, reds, whites, and greys the colors of power. M had favored black, as did Dowar. James preferred grey. So did Denbigh. Moneypenny liked her reds. Mallory was the first that he knew, in his career, who liked his blues. On the occasional Thursday, he was bold enough to wear pinstriped greens. They brought out his clear eyes so. Had someone told him once, that he was ageless and hewn of will, in how he was so recklessly himself, refusing to conform? Had an old lover, before Ireland, gifted him those cufflinks and his first suit of blue? How many women had loved him? Had they taken his cock in their mouths, had they welcomed him between their legs, had they walked along the Embankment hand-in-hand, in young love's spell? It was Christmas, and James wanted to know how the boy had become man. 

"You may respond, Director," Dowar said. 

She was a fair woman, James was beginning to see. She had continued to refer to Mallory by his title, despite Denbigh trying to take it away from him in form and formality. 

"OO7 is one of the best agents that the MI6 has. All our OO agents are exemplary. They are unusual in their methods, because you cannot achieve the impossible by turning to the usual methods. I trust each of them with our nation's safety and interests. Given that I trust them with Queen and country, I cannot be called foolish if I trust them with something that pales to insignificance in comparison." 

Mallory smiled peacefully, and spread his palms open in candor, incandescent in his flawed strength, bolstered by will even when torn apart. 

"My agents are not loose cannons. They bleed and die for you. Until very recently, they were retired into unmarked graves by the country they served." 

_Nostos_ , Mallory had told him, was the long, arduous return home, only to find that it had changed. MI6 had returned from Skyfall, facing domestic headwinds that wanted them dispersed and dismantled, with budgetary, political, and regulatory oversight, with their directors targeted and publicly discredited, with their finest soldiers called loose cannons that killed. Home was this. It was not what they had remembered and held close in their hearts, those old days of glory and fame. M had known it, had spoken it, in this very chamber. Ulysees would have wandered in his homeland, disowned and unwanted, if not for Telemachus. 

Mallory had not raised his voice, but he did not have to, not when every word was enunciated with imbued anger and will. 

"Sixteen months of my personal history after I returned from Ireland is classified by the Home Office," Mallory continued. "You have those archives before you." 

Denbigh's face had turned ugly.

"You don't have the clearance to speak of that, Mallory," he spat. 

"Our Signal Intercepts division has unearthed significant foreign terrorism interests in those sixteen months, in today's tribunal. They are now within the purview of the MI6." 

Dowar received a folder from one of the clerks. She scanned through the summary and nodded her head, allowing the clerk to distribute copies to the other members of the panel. 

"This is unprecedented," she commented, looking at Mallory in pleased surprise. "I suppose you did warn us about how it takes the unusual to accomplish the impossible, Director." 

She had not wanted him gone, then. James was relieved that Mallory had at least one politician he had not managed to make an enemy of yet. 

Tanner caught James's eye and nodded, just as Denbigh's henchmen began shooting. Mallory had the presence of mind to dive before Dowar, taking a bullet intended for her in the same shoulder he had taken a bullet for M.

Eve leapt across the benches and ran to cover Mallory. Dowar had taken cover behind the bulk of her wooden desk. 

"I am fine!" Mallory was saying, as he scrambled up to his knees, trying to shove Eve behind him to shield her. Denbigh was advancing on them, furious as only a man whose life was over could be. 

It was the longest shot James had taken in a while, in an indoor space. He had failed the last three of his long range-shooting examinations. James levelled his Walther PPK and shot Denbigh in the chest, over his right nipple. The bulletproof vest he must be wearing was little defense against the impact of the slug, and he reeled imbalanced, his gun falling away. As he scrabbled to his feet, Tanner pinned him in a hold and handcuffed him. 

"Where is Blofeld?" James asked, walking up to him. 

"Waiting for you in Dubrovnik," Denbigh spat, frothing at the mouth, shredding the skin of his wrists as he sought to escape. He turned to Mallory, who was braced against the nearest desk, letting Eve fuss over his shoulder. "You will wish you had gone to him."

The parliamentary medics had arrived. 

"It is only a scratch," Mallory was protesting, clammy and swaying, and Eve snorted.

James received a text from Q right then: _The odds of Mallory diving before a perfectly capable woman is eighty percent_. Q was typing still, and James knew what the next three dots would become.

"No vigilante justice, Bond," Mallory muttered, letting them cut open his decadent blue suit. James would hear about that later, about the worsted wool he had imported from Milan or Norway or some mountain town in Peru. 

James waited until it was just Tanner and him, and the MI6 personnel. Mallory had been carried away on a stretcher he vociferously complained about, until Eve silenced him with a look. Dowar had been taken away by her security. The room was cleared, but for the corpses. 

Tanner's expression was complicated. 

"Bond-"

"I will be measured in deed and word," James said, thinking of M. He knelt before Denbigh, whose panic was blunt and naked. He ripped open the bulletproof vest, and placed his hand over Denbigh's left nipple.   
  
"I have known men as you are all my life," James told him. "You are strong when you know you have another by his marionette strings. You had him dance, for months now. It was not enough to sate your perverse cruelty, was it? You had to see him falter, up close. You forced him to dine and drink with you, choosing where he sat and what he ate and what he wore, in places you controlled, letting him know with word and glance and touch how he was at your mercy."

Denbigh spat on him. His spittle smelled sour of his fear. His breath was coming in frightened pants. Mallory had clamped down on his fear for months, as he danced to this evil man's tunes. He had only confided how rattled he was to James once, in bed, when pressed, when he had come home with the taste of cognac in his mouth. 

"I can understand the grotesque fascination he poses for a soulless pervert like you," Denbigh said, taunting. "He is an artwork, isn't he?"

James sliced Denbigh's nipple off in a clean swipe. He plucked the parted flesh, pressed it into Denbigh's handcuffed palms, and whispered in his ear, "Art is an interest of mine." 

When Tanner and the others took Denbigh away, James opened his phone to Q's last text.

 _Try not to slice off his tongue. I have questions I need answers to. Perhaps a nipple would sate our resident avenging angel_.

And then, finally, 

_I don't think M would approve._

"Q?" James spoke into his earpiece. 

"Tanner is furious," Q said flatly. "You can't keep on this way, you know. Once is impulse, twice is deliberation."

It was not the second time. It was the third. He had shot White for Vesper. 

"Blofeld?"

"He will come after M, from what we have ascertained of his motivations and mode of operation. Stay with M. I will contact you. OO3 has been out of touch for six hours."

James swore softly and made his way to Kensington. 

\---- 

Mallory was in his bed when James arrived. The pain had settled into his bones, and he was struggling to stay lucid, his head tipped back and his eyes closed. The pulse at his throat was erratic. They had cut out the bullet, dressed the wound, and wrapped his ribs again. He was lucky that Silva's and Denbigh's henchmen could not shoot straight, that the bullets had not shattered bone. 

Eve had pulled a chair to his bed, and sat there watching over him, armed and facing the door. She was forcing him to take a dose of painkillers when James reached the threshold. 

"I am not addicted to them," Mallory told Eve suddenly, mentally somewhere else, clasping her wrist. 

"I know you aren't," Eve said gently. "Take these now, please."  
  
"I am not suicidal, Mum," he whispered, mind unmoored by the physical pain of his injury, coming on the heels of long weeks of sleep deprivation and stress and fear. His lashes were wet and James was suddenly glad that his eyes were closed shut in agony. "Please don't send me away," he begged, clutching Eve's hand in desperation. "They-" he swallowed dryly. "It hurts." 

Eve's face crumpled at the pained confession. She looked up at James, protective as any lioness, fearful that he might do or say something terrible in the face of such fragility. Six months ago, James would have. 

He said nothing as he walked to Mallory's bed and knelt beside, to run a hand across Mallory's brow, the same gesture that helplessly he succumbed to when Mallory shifted restless in sleep in his arms. Mallory stilled under his palm, and exhaled. His eyes fluttered open, with little lucidity. 

James plucked the pills from Eve's palm and pressed his hand under Mallory's head to lift him slightly. 

"Take these now, please," he said, as Mallory blinked up at him, frowning. 

He had forced his painkillers into Mallory's mouth in the helicopter ride back from Skyfall. Mallory had let him. Mallory let him now too. Eve passed James a glass of water. He lifted it to Mallory's mouth, and gently massaged his throat until he swallowed a few times. A semblance of situational awareness touched his gaze then, and he blinked hard, trying to force his tears away, his uninjured arm shaking as it came to cover his face. Eve sighed and shifted to sit beside him on the bed, and leaned forward to take his trembling hand and rest it by his side so that he would stop exerting himself. 

"You will be fine, sir," she said lightly, despite how sad she looked right then. He made to speak, but his gaze shifted into pained blankness, wiping clean his lucidity again. 

She shot James a warning glare. _Don't cock it up_. 

James watched the painkillers act rapidly. Empty stomach then. They had hit the bloodstream unusually fast. He frowned. 

"What happened?"

"His water was poisoned," Eve informed him. "The emetics would have reacted with anesthetics or painkillers." They had removed the bullet without pain mitigation. James wished he had cut out Denbigh's guts. 

"What was it?" 

Blofeld would not have permitted anything lethal. It must have been the last glass of water Mallory had sipped from, when the tides had turned, when Denbigh had seen that the game was lost. How had Mallory weathered through the final hour of the tribunal without letting on the agony he had been in? 

"Diluted paraquat. The dosage was calculated to be non-lethal." _Rodenticide_. Tanner would forgive James for the extrajudicial justice. 

Eve stood up and placed a hand on James's shoulder. 

"Fluids," she reminded him, as Mallory began to convulse, his constitution fighting the remnants of the toxin. James waved her off, and waited until she had closed the door behind her before pressing a kiss to Mallory's tear-wet cheek. 

He kept Mallory hydrated, forcing him to stay awake so that he could drink the electrolyte solution Eve had prepared, though all he wanted was to let Mallory find a brief reprieve in blessed sleep. James measured his heartbeat and monitored his lung activity through his convulsions, through his occasional plea to his family to not send him away, through his tearful apologies. His taped ribs and wound had been disturbed greatly by his incessant motion, and he had begun bleeding through the bandages, reminding James of Skyfall unpleasantly. He was sweating profusely and shivering from his body's erratic thermoregulation. James was glad for the silk bedding as it ensured insulation without further inflaming his pain-sensitized skin. These sheets, he reflected wryly, were lost to the cause. He opened his phone and searched for that Hellenic silk house in Soufli. There were no prices listed on the website. He could not help a tired grin at that. 

After two hours, Mallory's fever broke for a glimmer, and he looked at James, eyes red and shimmering wet in pain. 

"This is what you get for throwing yourself at married women," James teased him, running a gentle hand through his sweat-drenched hair. 

"You are here," Mallory said, voice cracking in dryness despite all the water James had forced him to imbibe, despite the marks in the crook of his shoulder that showed that the medics had pumped fluids intravenously. He forgot about his wounded side as he tried to push himself up seated. 

"Knock it off," James said, entertained despite himself, even as he hurried to steady Mallory who had turned faint as the pain overwhelmed his senses. 

"I need-"

"You can let me bring you a bedpan or piss yourself where you lie. Stop moving. Here, have a glass of water." 

He sat beside the dear thing and it was a mark of Mallory's dehydration that he drank the offered water down before protesting. 

James rolled his eyes. He should have expected Mallory to fuss so about something so inconsequential. He checked the bandages and was grateful that the sutures held. He could redress the wound cleanly once Mallory could sit upright for a minute. He wondered where the old sling was. At the rate Mallory got shot at, they might have to find the sling a place on the coat rack. His charge was grumbling still.

"Well, what do you want me to do? Call Eve?"

"No!" Mallory exclaimed, plainly mortified at the prospect. "She could be my daughter!" He closed his eyes in horror. "She saw me like this."

"She is not your daughter. She brought you here," James replied. "I had to help Tanner coordinate the fallout from your adventure of the day," James pointed out. "Let me help you now. What are you shy about, after everything I have done to you?"

"A catheter would serve," Mallory muttered, annoyed and in discomfort, and utterly oblivious to how James was charmed right then. 

"If you want your cock plugged, I can oblige when you aren't bleeding on my best suit. I have to say that I have never ventured into such interests, but you do have a way of bringing out the nascent pervert in me," James said wryly, wincing when Mallory laughed, helpless, and then gasped in pain when the sutures pulled. 

James leaned over the bed and got the pan. Mallory let him help without further complaints. He did not protest when James sat him up against the headboard, and changed his bloodied bandages. 

"Water?" James offered. 

"Right out of bedlam," Mallory croaked, his lips quirked in good humor. Then he sighed, and said in a quiet, apologetic tone, "It hurts, James." 

"I know."

James helped him lie back down, and sat watch over his heart.

\----

  
All was quiet on the warfront that night, and the next day, and the day that followed. James was as antsy as Q for tidings of 003, but they remained watchful and alert. 

"Here, sign this," Eve demanded, dumping a folder full of paperwork on Mallory's lap. 

"As you command, Miss Moneypenny," Mallory said, long-suffering and willing. 

He did draw the line when she steadied his wrist as he began to write. With an apologetic smile, he shook off her hand. 

"Paperwork for usurpation?" James asked, drawing up a chair for her at the table while she waited. 

"Tea, please," she crooned at him sweetly. With friends as these, James lamented, who needed Blofeld to be their ruin? 

"Did you go home at all?" She pestered, as she followed him into the kitchen. "You have been wearing the same trousers for almost three days now! I could have fetched you a change of clothes. Did you at least change your underpants?" 

"Who says I wear underpants?" James retorted. 

She spluttered, fascinated despite herself. Then she frowned and smacked him in the side with her Burberry purse. James had not gone home. Mallory had struggled to sit up in bed, the first day, and sleep came poorly to him. It was only this morning that he had been able to navigate the stairs with James's help. He was on the mend, it was clear now.

"The MI5 interrogation of Denbigh was cut short when they found him comatose in his cell," she said then, quietly. "Carbon monoxide."

"Blofeld has reach," James noted. "We expected that." He shook his head tiredly. "It is New Year's Eve in two days. We will not hear from him before that. He is waiting in Croatia. Any news from 003?"

"No," she said. "M is worried for him. No news is rarely good news when agents vanish."

"003 has weathered the Cold War," James reassured her. 003 was not an orphan selected by M to squeeze blood from stone, but he knew European crimescapes like the back of his hand from his long service in the Baltics and the Mediterranean.

He changed the subject then. "I see that your persistent attempts to teach him your name have been unfruitful." 

"I don't mind," she admitted, giggling, innocent for a slivered second. "I like his old world stuffiness." 

"Mallory!" James called out from the kitchen. "Eve thinks you are stuffy." 

Eve lashed him in the side with her purse again as they made their way to the dining room with a pot of tea and three cups.

"I am not signing this dispensation," Mallory said, when they had sat down with their tea. "There is no news from 003 yet. Bond has a desk job now. We cannot send him to chase criminals in Dubrovnik." 

There were other reasons too, James knew. Mallory had lived under the shadow of Blofeld's reach his entire adulthood. James had been impulsive and reckless in his violence in Portlaoise. He had shown his hand with Denbigh. Blofeld knew what James would kneel for. He had shown poor judgement when emotionally vested, with M, with Silva, with Vesper, with White. 

"He won't be drawn out by anyone else," James pointed out. "If he goes into hiding, we will have to be watchful for the rest of our lives. His masterminding nearly ended your career and did away with your life _thrice_. You cannot throw away this chance."

"I have lived thirty years under the threat," Mallory said quietly. "I am used to it by now."

"No, you aren't," James replied bluntly. 

Mallory was about to cut him down with a scathing remark, but Eve stepped in, and said, "Sir, it isn't merely your safety now. We cannot leave the threat unaddressed when MI6's very existence was compromised systematically." 

"I am coming along," Mallory said then, crisply tacking on an addendum to the dispensation for James's Croatia mission that Eve had put before him to sign. There was no joy in his face as he looked up at them. "We might as well as save him the logistics of relaying torture feeds internationally to obtain the requisite reactions from me." 

James flinched at the contained rage in the words. Mallory was not one for cruelty. That was all James. Eve took her leave in silence, sensing the undercurrents in the room. 

"I don't want you there," James said softly, when the door had closed behind them. "I cannot keep you safe." 

"If he wanted to take me, he could have, any day in the last thirty years. He wants me to go to him, willingly." 

Vesper had gone to Le Chiffre for Yusuf, willingly, betraying James, betraying her country. 

"You deserve to live your life without his shadow," James said, clasping Mallory's wrist, needing him to understand. "It is what I can give you. It is the only thing of value I can give you. I cannot afford to keep you in Soufli silks," he said, striving to lighten the confession. 

Mallory shook his head in consternation. "I kneel on your bathroom linoleum for you, James, willingly. You and I know what I value." He turned his palm to intertwine his fingers in James's, noting, "You are determined to go, with or without my blessing. So be it. I won't let you face him alone." 

"I don't want you there," James said, frightened beyond measure, knowing that neither of them would back down.

"I nurse similar opinions," Mallory said sardonically. "I suppose we will just have to make do, unless you change your mind." 

\----- 

"I could lock him in a padded cell, I suppose," James mused, as he drank down another cup of Q's caffeine infused black tea. "You can let him out after you learn the bloody fallout from Croatia." 

He sat with Q, reviewing their notes on Blofeld's network and supply chains. There had been no news from 003. There was mistletoe above Q's head, a sorry sprig. James suspected Tanner. 

"He isn't like you and me," Q said, unusually pensive. Was he one of those that got weepy during the holiday season? James chased the thought away. Q was more droid than man, when it came to sentimentalism. 

"What do you mean?"

"The jobs we do require us to be sociopaths," Q explained, non-judgmental, unsentimental. "Why do you think they evaluate our psychological status so frequently? They don't want normal well-adjusted citizens in these jobs. Why do you think Eve was pulled off the field to a desk job? She did not cut it as an agent. The late M, Tanner, you and I. Silva, the other agents. Most of us are capable of a compartmentalization of emotions and conscience." 

Q had struck at the heart of the matter, with his characteristic detached observation. 

"He is competent without compartmentalization, without resorting to the standard procedures. We use our rules to rationalize when what we do conflicts with our idea of ourselves. He cannot tell himself that it is the job he was asked to do, not when his conscience is at stake. It is what I like about him," Q admitted. "I get along with people, enjoy their company, care about their welfare, but I don't have a crippling emotional response should something harm them. It is what enables me to direct our agents in a number of life-threatening situations without loss of effectiveness." He shook his head. "I would _grieve_ if he died, and that is a first."

Q grinned then. "I have never had sex with someone so...emotionally available. How is it?"  
  
Intimacy was painful with Mallory, who had given everything of himself as if he were parched earth that had not known rain existed. He had kissed James bright-eyed and achingly brave, unshielded. James loved and loathed, and wanted to lash out in violence and cower in fear. Mallory did not know yet that he could thrust his hand into James's ribcage and pluck out his heart at his whim. 

"That painful, is it?" Q clucked sympathetically. "Stick to your kind next time. The ones that fuck and run." 

\------

"Edith," James greeted her. 

"I heard that he was injured in the parliament hearing," she replied. "Would you like to see my garden, Mr. Bond? Simon and I grew up outside London. We purchased this house because of the garden." 

She led James to the back, where there were roses in a hothouse, blooming in winter. The scent reminded him of the fresh roses Mallory had brought him on his birthday. There was an awning in the middle, covered by a trellis of shrubbery, with chairs and a table, with tea things set for them. 

"He used to study here," she murmured, pouring James tea. "Hated the cold back then. He was a lonely child. Simon and I worked long hours. When we returned, he would talk our ears off. He was the happiest in his time at Harrow, when he first met others his age." James had not been lonely until his parents had died. His mother had chased him through glen and glade.

"There was a girl. Linda." She smiled, reminiscing. "She ran the copier shop he used to print papers at. He would steal roses from my garden to gift her. Later there was Amelie, and Nadia, and Christie. He gave them roses. When he went to serve, we used to give the flowers away, to the local florist, at the corner of the Serpentine gallery. Mr. Peterson, the florist, mentioned that Gareth had ordered roses a few weeks ago from him." 

"He was shot in the right arm," James offered. "He was shot in the same arm earlier this year. He leapt before a bullet to save a woman, on both occasions. There is no cause for concern. He is recovering rapidly. Strong constitution." He winked at Edith. "I see where he gets it from."

She smiled at James just as her son did, bashful and uncertain how to take the flattery.

James walked to a shrub with as single budding bloom of brilliant white. 

"Damascus Rose, last bloom of the year." Edith told him. "They bloom once a year, usually in the summer. They say a crusader brought it back from Syria, in the fourteenth century."

James had gone to Damascus a few times, for M, crusading on behalf of his country. Damascus was a city of silk and steel and roses. 

"May I pluck this one?" 

"I had not taken you for a connoisseur of roses," Edith remarked. "Let me cut it for you. It has thorns unlike the modern cultivars." 

Silk, and steel, and pure, white roses that had thorns. 

"It was his favorite," Edith murmured, as she painstakingly removed the thorns from the stem. "I don't think we have plucked a bloom from this bush before." 

James was not surprised. He took the blooming bud from her, holding it by the stem carefully. 

_O when her life was yet in bud, He too foretold the perfect rose._

"He was born on the first day of Spring, the nineteenth of March," Edith remarked. She pointed up at the shrubbery that grew on the trellis that covered their awning. "My husband had this built for me, during my pregnancy. It was a difficult pregnancy. I was nauseated and worn out, and he was restless in my womb. Here was my reprieve. The scents soothed me. I wondered if it soothed him too. When I gave birth, the awning was in bloom. These rose shrubs are another Damask cultivar, called the roses of Princes. They cluster in dozens, and are sweetly fragrant, pink huing red as they flower, the first of the roses of Damascus that bloom in the year, and the last to wither, resilient to the vagaries of weather and soil and worm and human. I was fond of Twain as a child. He had written of Damascus on his travels. _Damascus, the Pearl of the East, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten_. I held my son first when our roses of Damascus bloomed, and I thought, as any young mother does, that my child was meant for greatness and love, fullness of health and family, and a legacy that would outlast his life," 

She smiled at James, embarrassed by what she had offered. "I have never told him this. It was hubris then. What mother should ask for greatness when she could ask for her child's safety? Damascus is in ruins. If I asked now, I would ask that he be average, ordinary, content." 

James wondered what his parents had wanted for him. He had once thought that he knew what M had wanted for him. He had been wrong about all of it. She had said, at the end, that she had got one thing right. 

"Your wish holds, in a fashion," James offered Edith. "He is resilient as no other in his place would be. It is not an Empire in the East that spans centuries, but what he builds will outlast him. Those who know him value him."

"Is that enough, Mr. Bond?"

"You should ask him that, some day." 

\------

They removed the bandages that evening, and Mallory was back to keeping his arm in the sling. 

"If you continue down this path, I shall begin to think this is an accoutrement," James said, kissing the sling. He plucked Mallory's brace on the other side of his chest and snapped it taut, relishing in the gasp that earned him. 

"Are you returning to work now?" Mallory asked politely, eyes full of mischief. James knew where this was headed. He shook his head and made his way to the kitchen. He had dinner plans that he was not going to let Mallory distract him from. 

"Two weeks!" Mallory called out. He followed James into the kitchen and sighed when he saw the tomatoes for _alla marinara_ stewing on the stove. 

"How is pasta the first thing on your mind now that my bandages are removed and I am cleared for more strenuous activities?" 

He did not sound too upset. Lust spliced his expression, before he could mask it, when he saw James tug back his sleeves to start hand rolling the ground lamb into meatballs. James winked at him. Dozens of beautiful women had offered sweet compliments when they had noticed his forearms. Mallory's unschooled reaction did more for James's ego than all of that. 

"Think you can hold on until I finish making the meatballs?" James teased him. 

Mallory's smile was embarrassed and honest as he came to James's side and began stirring the sauce with his good hand, his movements easy and economical, though careful and studied. Ah, so he was not used to cooking - James had suspected as much.

"I don't know what I am doing," he admitted, when he saw James staring at him. "I can only be trusted with tea and breakfast." 

"Keep stirring," James told him. "I need to make meatballs and I cannot afford to have you humping me meanwhile."

"I wouldn't!" Mallory exclaimed, laughing, red seeping into his ears as his imagination took over.

"I give it ten minutes," James taunted him, before turning back to the meatballs in earnest. 

Lamb, of course. Mallory, despite a delayed discovery of junk food in the form of peri-peri chicken, liked tender red meat the best. James had earned so many Nando's rewards points with his patronage thanks to his addicted lover. Q had wanted them transferred over to him in case James snuffed it in Croatia.

Garlic, black pepper, Romano, eggs, salt, bread. He hesitated as he reached for the parsley. It was no proper polpettine without the parsley, but Mallory liked herbs only in his soap, contrary creature that he was. 

He placed the large saucepan on the stove and began frying the meatballs. The smell took him back to Abruzzo. He had wanted to take Vesper there. 

"I spent a year in Abruzzo," he told Mallory, as the meat sizzled, as the flavors permeated their kitchen. "I was twenty. Royal Navy Reserve. San Vito Chietino. Lucretia was a young widow. Twenty-eight. Orphaned but for the Church. Two children, the second unweaned yet. She cooked my meals and washed my clothes. First woman I fucked. We did it on the tiny cot in my room. She screamed when I put my head between her legs. She was leaking milk when she came on my cock and I couldn't get enough of it. She taught me to make meatballs. No care in the world then, until M called me back, and gave me my first mission."

Mallory looked so fucking grateful, as if James had named a planet after him. 

"Keep stirring," he told him shortly. This came easier when Mallory did not look at him.

"Three forty women, after that," he continued. "Met them on missions. Sometimes, I was tasked to. Mostly, I met them and liked something about them, and fell into bed with them. None of them had Lucretia's simplicity of intention. Never tasted a young mother's milk, after Abruzzo. I associated sex with the simplest and least painful of human barter, because of Lucretia, though the three hundred and forty that followed should have taught me otherwise. There was nothing simple about sex, after Abruzzo."

"No men," he confirmed, though Mallory should have known that by how James was clumsy with him often. "Never slept with the M before you, despite what they say." He placed his hands on Mallory's waist and moved him away from the stove, so that he could pour the sauce over the meatballs and see to the pasta. 

"Can you open the wine to let it breathe?" He asked. Mallory looked conflicted. "I picked a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for you. Let me spoil you tonight, please."

"I don't need to be spoiled," Mallory said, but he went to open the wine James had set out.

James fetched the dinnerware and laid out the settings. Then he went to carry over their dinner. He pulled out Mallory's chair for him, bearing the amusement on his lover's face with good grace. The amusement slipped away to painful fondness when he noticed the L.E.D candle and a lone fresh-cut white rose, more bud than bloom, in the thin glass flute on the table. 

"That is from my mother's garden, isn't it?" Mallory asked softly. "She has had the grafts for years."

"Yes," James said. 

"James," Mallory began, reaching to clasp his hand. 

"I loved one woman. Vesper Lynd. She died in Venice in a flooded elevator shaft, fighting to breathe, and I failed to save her. I had been so sure that I could, that I was enough, and I could not even weep when they brought her to me a corpse, bloated and blue. I had been willing to leave the service behind for her. She betrayed me for love. That is how the drinking began. I did not enjoy alcohol for its own sake, not as you do. Not all of us are born hedonists." He winked at Mallory as he poured the wine, smiling at how the rich scent made his companion close his eyes in pleasure. 

"I don't like drinking alone," Mallory said, though he plucked his wineglass to sip. "Especially in your company. I feel guilty." He sighed in decadent satisfaction as the flavors of the rich wine hit his palate. 

"We will have to help you get over that," James said plainly, serving them the pasta and meatballs. 

They ate in silence. James watched him so, how he relished every bite of his dinner, how he washed down James's fare with the wine James had chosen for him. He had never made Lucretia's dinner for anyone. Twenty years, and there it was, the reason he had waited.

"James, I cannot thank you enough," Mallory said, as he laid down the silverware, his plate clean, and his glass empty. He had a softness to him as he looked at James, over the candle, over the lone rose from his mother's garden. James had seen him so raw only when he had been wrung out by sex. 

"You enjoy your alcohol, in moderation, with your fancy dinners. I don't want you to give up something you take pleasure in just because I was a fuckup who couldn't cope any other way. Alcohol does not trigger me; neither the smell of it in your glass, nor the taste of it in your mouth."

He took a deep breath and continued with his plunge into his heart. "What triggers me is knowing that you are in danger, that I cannot protect you. Every time I think I can, that the skills and training of twenty years can be used to shield what I love, I am taught that is hubris, that I cannot. I couldn't save Vesper. I couldn't save M. I am frightened that we are flying to Croatia tomorrow and that I cannot save you." 

Mallory's eyes were sharp and their intensity made James want to look away. He did not. He could be brave here, at the end.

"Tennyson has been the poet of our year, hasn't he?" James spoke the words he had nursed since Portlaoise. 

"The long result of love, and boast,  
Behold the man that loved and lost,  
But all he was is overworn." 

"You haven't lost me," Mallory said quietly. 

This, then, was the final secret James had to yield.

"I have loved you, every day since I first hit you. Love clasps loss tight as sides of a coin. Drunk with love is drunk with loss." He smiled wanly. "You weaned me off my addiction and did not notice that I had exchanged it for another."

"You won't mourn me tomorrow," Mallory stated calmly, taking the rose from its flute and running a finger along its stem. 

James was relieved that Edith had removed the thorns. Mallory cut him a knowing glance, searingly perceptive as only he could be. He lifted the rose and pressed his lips to where the sharpest thorn had been. His confidence made James want to weep. 

"I trust you to protect me, to bring me back home." 

He must have seen how overwhelmed by emotion James was. With deliberation, he caught the rose between his teeth, mischief blooming bright in his eyes, and began stripping at their dinner table, in the light of the one candle James had lit. It was a clumsy endeavor, what with the sling, but it did accomplish what Mallory wanted, to turn James's fears into lust. 

"I suppose I have to thank heavens for small mercies, that you waited until I wined and dined you," James said, unable to stop smiling. He shook his head and walked over to help him with his clothes, pressing a soft kiss to the bare, warm skin at the hollow of Mallory's throat.

"Your mother would be horrified at the uses you find for her floral gifts," he commented, treasuring Mallory's flushed cheeks at the remark. He plucked the rose from Mallory's mouth, so that he could kiss the man properly, tasting wine and tomatoes and lamb. 

"I did not thank you for skipping the parsley," Mallory said then, sharp in his observations even when he had been so distracted by James's confessions. 

"I will be sure to extract gratitude from every inch of you. There is a long way to sunrise," James said cheekily, laughing as his insouciance had its predictable effect in making Mallory both righteously scandalized and hopelessly aroused. 

James could feel the two weeks pressing into his groin. It was the first time that Mallory had been aroused without foreplay, without a great deal of caresses and carefully chosen salacious taunts that sparked his imagination. 

"Pent up, aren't you?" James remarked, copping a rough pass down the hard cock, to the tight, flushed balls beneath. 

"I have been keeping to my end of the deal with saintly patience." 

Mallory's reserve was slipping all too early in the proceedings. He was so warm and needy as he clung. James pitied him and decided not to tell him that his cunning plans for the night were hardly to address the desperation before hours of inflaming him further. 

"James?" Mallory sighed in impatience. "How could you possibly be so composed after two weeks?" 

"I was getting myself off, regular as clockwork. You forgot to tack a restriction onto my end of the deal," James reminded him, grinning at the violent lust in Mallory's kiss then. 

"I didn't forget," Mallory muttered, when James had let him pull away to breathe. "I asked you not to bed others. I asked you for _monogamy_ when I didn't even know if I could please you in bed. Given that, I did not think it wise to demand that you refrain from the sin of Onan."

"Nothing like a sprinkle of the Bible to get me hot-blooded," James noted, unable to stop laughing. "What a bold thing you were, asking me to be only yours when you didn't even know if you could put out."

He kissed the man to soothe the sting out of his amusement. Mallory talking filth was irresistibly charming and utterly at odds to what James had encountered before. 

"Sin of Onan. Some days, I wonder what arthouse porn were you wanking to before I saved you from your right hand!"

Mallory was wet already, leaving streaks along James's shirt, unspooling into need, pressing his hips into James without even realizing what he was doing. 

"You are humping me," James pointed out, shifting out of their embrace, painfully taken with the sight of Mallory so affected by so little. He ran a hand down breastbone to navel, along the long scar that McKendall's axe had left. It anchored him, gave him the wherewithal not to take. He had taken all his life. That night, before they flew to Croatia the next day, he wanted Mallory to ask, to ask and to hear James's answer that Mallory owned all that he asked for, had done so for quite a while. 

"No sex downstairs today. Up you go. Let us make good use of your Hellenic purveyance." 

Never one to say no to the comforts of his bed, Mallory bit back his impatience and turned to the stairs. "Come along?" He beckoned. 

"After you," James said, picking up the candle and the rose to follow him. "The view is to die for."

Mallory lost his footing on the stairs, but James caught him. 

"You make it easy," James said wryly, shoving him forward gently, so that he took the stairs before James. The self-consciousness was glaringly evident in how taut his spine was and the goosebumps on his skin.

Mallory cleared his throat when they crossed the threshold of the bedroom. 

"How do you want me?" 

"You are the one in pressing need," James said, placing the candle on the bedside table, by his copy of Tennyson. "I have all night. Perhaps I shall read some poetry before bed."

Mallory's eyes flashed, as he placed his good hand at James's collar, and ordered, "Off with your clothes. You will see to me now." 

James bit back a grin and stripped. Mallory's eyes were so dark and dilated as he watched James toe off his house-slippers, and shuck his trousers and boxers off in a single, smooth motion. His hand came to James's right thigh, pressing firm, rubbing up and down roughly. 

"You don't look as if you would get through a single poem. You are in quite the state," Mallory observed, his wit more joyful than taunting, as if he could not believe yet that James rubbed himself raw for two weeks in frustration wanting what he could not have, as if he did not know that a waft of his fucking Icelandic soap was enough to send James to half mast in Pavlovian conditioning.

"What did you expect? You stripped at dinner and wiggled your arse up the stairs like a brazen tart. I am a red-blooded Englishman." 

"Scottish," Mallory corrected, though he flushed at the words James used, running his palm to swipe across the flat of James's stomach, underneath shirt and vest. "Q asked you to help him buy a kilt." He looked at James as if he was seeing him anew. "I want you in a kilt." 

"I thought you wanted me to strip?" James wondered. He earned a nip to his mouth for that. He could not wait to see how Mallory would sear him to heart and bone, once the last of his reserves had been stripped away by passion. He took a deep breath so that he did not prematurely embarrass himself. 

"You are close," Mallory's voice was surprised, as he pressed his nose to James's collar, inhaling. "You smell as if you are close." 

"Who needs bloodhounds?" James mocked him, taking off his shirt and vest under Mallory's wanting gaze. "Humping my leg, smelling my skin, _biting_ , you understand that these are canine behaviors." James smirked at him. They both knew what he would say next, and they both knew that Mallory would startle, torn between shame and arousal. "Perhaps I should put you on your hands and knees, and drag you about with a leash. Feed you from a bowl, play fetch, and make you bark for release." 

Mallory swayed where he stood, his hand clenching on James's arm to steady himself. His eyes had slipped closed, and when James grabbed him by the throat to suckle at his neck, he threw his head back willingly. James bore him down to the bed, dragging a hand to his head to cup him close, and the other to his hip to hold him where he should be, contained between James's frame and the bed.  
  
"Have me," Mallory demanded, eyes blown wide, overwhelmed, sliding against James's stomach as he arched. 

He saw the answer before James spoke it, and he said sharply, "I am ready, James. Fuck me. Do you want me to beg you? I can't crawl for you tonight, not with my hand in a sling. I would gladly, if I could, if that got you aroused enough to stop fretting and fuck me." 

"Keep talking like that, and I will come on you," James warned him, kissing him into silence. "You have no bloody idea how close I am, do you? I could barely stave it off at dinner, after dinner, when you caught that rose between your teeth, when you stumbled into my arms on the stairs, when you demanded that I strip, when you all but swooned when I teased you about making you crawl."

He took a deep breath and continued, "You want to be fucked before you go to Croatia, because you are afraid we won't return." 

"I have wanted this for weeks," Mallory replied, not yielding an inch. When had he ever yielded in what mattered to him? Such an obstinate creature that James held precious. 

"We will return from Croatia," Mallory continued, as if he were a prophet. James shook his head at the folly of hubris, and thought of Damascus. "We cannot control tomorrow, James. I want you to have me because I have wanted it for weeks, ever since you stuffed me full with your tongue. You came without a touch just by doing that to me. It is all I could think of, whenever I looked at you in want afterwards."

He shifted up to pluck the condom and the lubricant from the bedside table. He dumped them in James's palm and looked up, serene. 

"Get to it, please," he said, as if he were asking Eve to refill an ink pot for him, offering himself to James without a tremble. 

James grabbed him by the thighs and spread him wide. He pressed a kiss to Mallory's navel. _O heart, how fares it with thee now_ , he thought, as he pressed down the iliac crest from navel, to the protuberance of the pubic bone. Mallory's cock was wet and hot in his mouth, foreskin retracting under a flick of tongue, letting James drink of him. The lack of two hands had left him ungroomed, unlike his usual appearance there. James had liked his women natural between their legs. He found that he held the same bias for Mallory, as he nuzzled his jaw through the coarse curls. When he laved his tongue down, crossing the sensitive perineum to the warm place he sought, Mallory grabbed him by the neck. 

"Can you promise to wait?" He demanded. "I shall be very cross if you come doing that tonight." 

The knowing in Mallory's tone made James flush. He was close. He would come if he licked Mallory open. 

"You could tie me," he said, hating how his voice betrayed his lust. 

Mallory did not understand. Oh, this made it more embarrassing. James put on a face of insouciance and clambered over him, to pick up his tie from where it lay discarded. 

"Oh!" Mallory gasped, eyes wide in prurient fascination as he watched James tied a knot at the base of his cock, tugging his balls for good measure to stave off an orgasm. "Does that hurt?" 

"That is rather the point," James muttered, kissing the incredulous grin off Mallory's face, before returning to his place between the spread legs. "If you think a smidge of pain lets you escape being ravished thoroughly, think again."

Mallory fell silent at that. Good. James set about to opening him with his tongue. He yielded to James easily this time, holding his legs wide without exhortation, unfurling to his mouth in long undulations of spine. He had an easier time giving in to intimacy on his back. James wanted him on his belly the next time, and blindfolded. 

He pressed a finger at the entrance, and inhaled sharply when the warmth dragged it in without struggle. Mallory's eyes shot wide open, as he foisted himself on his good elbow, mouth slack. Watching him, sheened by sweat and desire, James was relieved that he had tied off his cock. The sight would have ended the night for him. The pulse of him about James's finger was alive and erratic. 

"Stop wriggling. I don't want to hurt you." 

"Stop dawdling," Mallory ordered, voice hewn hoarse already, and James had not even begun fucking him. This bright, desiring fire of him would be the death of James one day.

He fumbled open the lubricant and reached for the condom. 

"Do you need the condom?" Mallory asked, catching James by the wrist. 

"Three hundred and forty one women," James reminded him. When had he last fucked a woman without a condom? Never, after Vesper, he realized.   
  
"That was before. Your latest medical came back clean," Mallory told him. "No condoms, please." 

"You have nothing to compare to," James told the idiot, putting the condom away nevertheless. Mallory did not have the habit of asking for what he did not want, and he was fucking stubborn when he wanted something. "This is ribbed. Sensualist that you are, you may actually like it better with a textured condom." 

"Your cock has ample texture to suit my preferences," Mallory said, lying back down, beaming up at him, as if he had won a debate at the Oxford Union. 

Bedlam. Nobody had called his cock amply textured before. 

"Your dirty talk can be patented," James muttered, focusing on the banter as he daubed a fistful lubricant over his cock, and then poured the rest onto his palm to finger Mallory open properly. 

The drag of his fingers inside made Mallory clench his stomach at the unusual stimulus. He kept his eyes on James, as if to anchor himself. 

"Stop biting your cheek. You have done yourself enough injury for the year."

"James, this isn't what I expected," Mallory whispered then, proud and shaken and utterly surrendered to him, eyes gleaming, mouth wet, flushed on cheek and chest and thigh, on sheets of silk with a rose of Damascus by him. His erection had waned, as he sought to reconcile the sensations, but James saw that he wanted this, in every trembling breath and sigh. 

"Careful with the hand," James cautioned him, as he dragged Mallory's legs around his waist. 

This was how he had fucked Lucretia first. Missionary, they called it, and James had not understood how making love was praying at an altar. He had not understood it until he had made love to Vesper so. He had been too cocky to be frightened then. 

Now that he had known love and loss and betrayal and death, he knew that this was to be feared. 

_So find I every pleasant spot_  
_In which we two were wont to meet,_  
_The field, the chamber, and the street,_  
_For all is dark where thou art not._

He kissed every spot of skin that he could reach, as he entered the body beneath, meeting his lover skin to skin, pulse to pulse, in the warm and fluttering chamber of his body. Closing his eyes was of no help, because all he smelled and felt and touched was Mallory. 

"Are you all right?" He was not a praying man. The tone of his voice, right then, could not be called anything other than devout. 

"Aren't you meant to move?" Mallory parried, though he was completely overwhelmed and breathless, his hand sketching restless patterns up and down James's spine. His eyelashes were clumped together from perspiration. James pressed a kiss to his nose, throwing off Mallory's tension. 

"Are you all right?" He asked again, bracing himself on his forearms, taking his weight off Mallory, but for where they were connected. 

"I am nervous," Mallory admitted, with a weak smile. "And I will be, until you start moving. You know how I find it hard to stop thinking unless you hustle me straight into the action." 

So he had noticed that James tended to leave him no time to spiral into overthinking and self-consciousness when they had sex. James had not mentioned it before, knowing how Mallory was vulnerable to words chosen wrong, and James was not a man of words. 

"I noticed," Mallory said, shifting his hips up experimentally, and then exhaling sharp at how James grew harder in him. 

"I want you to get used to the sensation, before I begin," James explained. 

"Fucked the uninitiated before, have you?" Mallory asked, curious as ever. 

"Of course not," James said, laughing at the thought of any of his previous partners being inexperienced in the least. Most of them had taught him things. His laugh made Mallory clench about him, and it was all James could do not to snap his hips. "The internet is not without its uses." 

"You looked up how to fuck me on the internet," Mallory asked, breathless. He was shifting constantly, driving James spare. 

"There were memes. They said that I should fuck you like this," James replied, swooping to kiss him, before pistoning his hips at a steady pace. He knew how to fuck, even if he had not fucked a man before. He was grateful for that, because Mallory was falling apart, legs coming to clutch him tight, squeezing his cock that it hurt. Years of experience let James rub circles on his hips and beneath Mallory's navel, forcing him to unclench. He scrabbled a hand to his own cock, dragging off the tie, so that he could begin fucking properly without fainting on his lover light-headed. He brought his hand then to Mallory's cock, dragging long and low, taking the pre-ejaculate and bringing it to smear Mallory's lips. 

"Suck my finger in now, just as you are sucking my cock into your arse. Who would think that this is your first time? You are taking cock like you do this for money."

Mallory sucked his finger in, hollowing his cheeks, the trust in his eyes incandescent, and there was no word for him but _beloved_ , as he came between their stomachs, forcing James to still around the convulsions. He hoped, for the sake of his poor cock, that Mallory was not this tight every time. 

Most women did not like being fucked after they came. James was willing to bet that Mallory would enjoy it, the hopeless sensualist that he was. He waited until Mallory's orgasm subsided, and then started fucking him in earnest, holding back not a jot of strength, and Mallory screamed as he scraped his cock against his prostate for the first time. James placed a hand on his arm so that he would not injure it again, and let him fight until he fell back exhausted. All of James's back was scratches and all of his neck was marked by teeth. Mallory's toes were grappling to find purchase on the sheets. His gaze had no lucidity, as James nailed his prostate directly on every thrust. When James came in him, he tightened again in a prolonged, dry convulsion, physiological limitations fighting the stimuli, and he fell back in a near faint, all tears and sweat. 

James held him, running soft caresses on his cooling skin, and wiping off his tears. He decided that smugness was well-merited, and yawned as he stretched his tired limbs. Mallory was unresponsive for a while, letting James soothe him and hold him.

"How could they let you go?" was the first question. 

James grinned at him. "Finally understood the appeal of James Bond?"  
  
"Transcendental," Mallory said fervently, rubbing his cheek against the silk. No limits to the hedonism, James thought fondly.

"Did I fuck you insensate?" 

Mallory hummed, too tired to join him in banter. 

"Fuck you silly. Fuck you senseless," James said, thoughts meandering. "I wonder if anyone ever lost their wits after a good fucking." 

Mallory mustered the strength to pinch him in the side. 

"Are you all right?"

"I want to know. How could they let you go after the tantric marvel that is your cock?" 

He had tried yoga after Vesper's death, to see if it could fucking help with _anything_. It had not. He pulled his mind back to the present, where he had Mallory pestering him, oblivious about the obvious as the man ever was. 

"Nobody minded the cock," James told him frankly. "They minded the baggage that came with the cock. Sensible women know better than to chase lost causes."

"Did I chase you?" Mallory asked, curious.

"You are not a chaser. You clung like a barnacle and wore me down," James said, laughing. He turned to kiss Mallory softly. "Do you need a paracetamol? Are you sore? If you are sore now, you will be doubly so tomorrow." 

Mallory waved him off, and promptly fell asleep. The miracle of a guilt-free conscience, James thought, placing the rose on Mallory's chest, watching the bloom of Damascus against his lover's skin. Guilt had always lived under James's skin, wrapped in loss and grief. 

_Behold me, for I cannot sleep, and like a guilty thing I creep._  
  
He crept and clung, and loved his heart through the night's long dark. 

\------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nostos is the journey home. Thank you for sailing with me. We'll now set course for home.


	5. The course of human things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait. I clung to a twelve-year-old tradition of posting the finale on a weekend. 
> 
> It is a tad choppy, but we'll end in a soft place, and we'll get there together.

Mallory did not complain in the morning. He was in obscenely good spirits, whistling along to the Clash's _Should I stay or Should I go_ , as James made him breakfast. 

"I took you for a classical music aficionado," James remarked.

"I was a punk kid," Mallory said, his snobbery at utter odds with his declaration. "I don't know any band before The Who." 

Liar. His home assist software had Sibelius and Gluck in his playlist. James shook his head and let him pretend that he was normal. 

_"Happy New Year!"_

Edith. If they returned from Croatia intact, James was dragging Mallory to his parents. He would demand that they make peace and stop texting him as a liaison. He was forty-fucking-two, and he had a desk job, and Mallory's parents checked in on their son through James. 

"You are not sore?" James checked. They had a long flight ahead.

Mallory smiled at his concern, and fed him a spoonful of perfectly poached egg. James hated poached eggs. He made them because Mallory liked them and there was no point in making eggs two different ways.

"James, they strung me up like a pig, with live wire, for weeks. Compared to that, there can be no discomfort you can bring to my arse," Mallory said darkly, careless of speech as he rarely was, and that spelled the end of James's appetite. Mallory then stilled, as he realized what he had spoken. 

_And dead calm in that noble breast, which heaves but with the heaving deep._

"James-"

"Do try and refrain from talking about torture at meal-times. I have a desk job now, after all. Drink your tea before it goes cold." 

He waited for five minutes so that he would not cause Mallory concern, and then rose to his feet, and hurried to the toilet to throw up. 

\---

Mallory was chatting with the pilot of the small charter plane, polite as he could be to strangers even when they were paid by criminal masterminds to ferry him across the Continent to a dire fate. 

_Good luck_ , Eve had texted. She had sent the same message as he had driven M to Skyfall. It had jinxed them all. 

James plugged his earpiece in. 

"Q?" 

His anxiety must have registered, because Q said calmly, "If you cock it up, I will fix it. I always do."

Mallory came to sit beside him, and fumbled with the seatbelt, his injured arm restricted in its motion. He had left the sling at home. James had not pressed him. 

"I am scared of flying," he said conversationally. "And of being driven around. I feel like luggage at somebody's whim."

"We are luggage at somebody's whim," James pointed out wryly, and fastened the seatbelt for him. Mallory's stomach was warm under his hand and he smelled of his herby sheep milk soap. 

The take off was loud and turbulent. Mallory muttered, "I prefer the passenger planes. Private planes and helicopters are terrible as aviation experiences."

"You have a pilot's license. You flew in the Air Force," James reminded him. 

"I don't mind flying a plane. I mind being ferried around," Mallory said, yawning. He placed his head on James's shoulder, without as much as word of warning, and said, "Wake me up when we land."

"I thought you hated flying."

"Yes, that is why I am going to sleep through it." 

_Is this the end of all my care?_  
_And circle moaning in the air:_  
_Is this the end? Is this the end?_

James thought of Ulysses, and held Mallory through the turbulence. 

\--- 

"I haven't been to Croatia before," Mallory said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, when James shook him awake. He peered through the windows, curious as a tourist, and saw only darkness. 

"They have beaches," Mallory continued. "I haven't been to a beach in decades, unless you count the port of Honduras, which I don't."

"The boring vicissitudes of your life thus far," James said, knowing well that Mallory wanted him to banter along, so that they could forget, at least for a while, what awaited them. "If I had known that you wanted board shorts and sand castles, I could have taken you to Brighton." 

James would have taken him to Abruzzo, to Bali, to Puerto Vallarta, to Reynisfjara, if they had not met in the shadows, one reeling from Skyfall and the other defying a man who had hunted him for three decades.

"Well, now you know," Mallory said pragmatically. "I made seashell and twine earrings for my mum as a boy. She wore them to court to prosecute Matt Hauser."

"The coal magnate?"

"Yes, he was a paedophile," Mallory said, as the plane landed. "Mum refused to let me watch the case on television. Daddy told me that she was putting behind bars a man who liked little girls instead of liking his wife. I remember being baffled by the explanation." He shook his head. "My jewelry was featured on prime television for eight weeks, and she did not let me watch a minute of it." 

They unfastened their seatbelts and James went to open the door. The pilot was dead in the cockpit, a dart of strychnine in his neck. 

"Come along," he told Mallory, letting him descend first, shielding him from the sight.

"He won't go home, will he?" Mallory asked softly, as they walked to the waiting car with the bright headlights that was parked on the far end of the landing pad. The cold wind that buffeted the airstrip caught James by surprise. Winter in Croatia had been warmer, in his memories.

"Let us worry about us now," James muttered, pulling his jacket tighter about him. 

\---- 

There was a bald man in the backseat, with a siamese on his lap. His eyes were sharp, his hands were soft, and his face and form corpulent. 

"Mr. Bond, you will not mind riding shotgun, I hope?" He greeted. "It has been a while since I have been so close to Gareth."

"We met once," Mallory rejoined. James brushed his back and opened the door for him. Mallory's face was unreadable as he took the seat beside Blofeld. He fumbled with the seatbelt, as he had on the plane. Blofeld's hands covered his thin palms to help him secure the belt. 

James said nothing and closed the door. Then he walked about to the passenger side at the front, and wondered when he had last offered the back of his skull to a criminal on a plate. 

The drive went by slowly, in silence. The winding country ways about hillside and sea made James queasy, after the turbulence in the flight. He hoped Mallory was not unsettled as they jolted over pothole and rough bump on the poorly maintained roads. He wanted to check in the rearview mirror, but he restrained the impulse to. The lights of a seaside mansion came to view, at the end of the winding road. As they veered sharply about a turn, James heard Mallory curse, and flicked his eyes to the mirror in concern. Blofeld's hand was on his belly, placid, over the clasp of his seatbelt, right where James had placed his hand during the flight. James knew immediately that he had kept it there during the entirety of the drive.

"Have you heard of the Omphalos hypothesis, Mr. Bond?" Blofeld asked. 

"No," James replied curtly. 

"It strives to explain why God gave Adam a navel." 

James did not reply.

"I have found," Blofeld continued quietly, "I have found, Mr. Bond, that every navel is unique. Have you perchance noticed this on your sexual adventures? How does his differ from the three hundred that you fucked before?"

They pulled up the driveway. Armed men stood guard. Blofeld patted Mallory, unfastened his seatbelt for him, and then eased his own ponderous weight out of the car. James exited at gunpoint, and watched Mallory do the same. 

"You did not answer my question, Mr. Bond."

"I cannot say I understand the utility of the question," James said carefully. Blofeld was the sort of man who would not rest until he answered, who would employ creative methods until James spoke. 

"It is pertinent to our venture, I reassure you." 

An armed guard stepped closer to Mallory. 

"No remarkable features," James said flatly. 

He had kissed and suckled there, in love, in devotion. There was the familiar scarring of live wires, as there were in many crannies and hollows of Mallory's body. _thou seemest human and divine, the highest, holiest manhood, thou_ , he had thought, borrowing Tennyson's words, as he skimmed lips in prayer over warm skin. 

"Gareth has not told you then?" Blofeld asked. "We should remedy that. No secrets between lovers, as they say. Come on in. I have dinner waiting."

The walls were inlaid with mirrors and there were suits of armor at every turn. The carpets were new and there were no creaky floors beneath. 

The dining room was for sixteen. Blofeld directed James to the left of the head of the table. He drew Mallory's chair for him, across James. Mallory did not thank him. 

"Running about with the MI6 has ruined your good manners," Blofeld commented, taking his seat at the head of the table. Silent waiters came bearing the dinner. 

The pomp and splendor were at odds with what they served. Peri-peri chicken. James hated the anguish that glimmered in Mallory's eyes before he schooled his expression clean of emotion.

"I had to call in a favor for the recipe from Johannestown," Blofeld commented. "I lived there for a few years, did you know? I flew back to the West after ten years in Africa when I heard that you had come to Geneva. You had changed, I realized, from the boy you had been."  
  
Mallory looked at him, surprised.

"Your mother was so proud of you," Blofeld laughed. "She put so many of my generals behind bars. Matt Hauser was sentenced to a lifetime in prison, and she crowed to the press that she had done it wearing the earrings you had made for her. I decided to have her son taken from her, make him nameless and stateless and raise him to be the criminal she fought everyday tooth and nail." 

He cut the meat neatly into cubes. Neither Mallory nor James reached for their plates.

"Then I realized, as I watched you over the years, in idle musings in-between my daily work, that revenge was not a worthy pursuit anymore. No, you shone so bright. The next prime minister, your father was fond of telling his friends. When you turned twenty, when you left Oxford, everyone knew that your father was not bragging. Your mother's grief was no longer the prize." He speared a cube and brought it to Mallory's mouth. Mallory did not take the offering. 

"Your mother's grief was not the prize anymore. You, stubborn and brilliant, was the prize I had waited for. I had a child, did you know? With a prostitute. Tried a hand at rearing it into my protege. It did not go well, for the child. You would have been wasted as a politician. Your place, I knew, was by my side. A little island clinging to yesteryear's might had nothing to offer you, not when I could give you five continents."

"Eat up. Mr. Bond would hate to lose his fingers." 

Mallory bent to take the cube of chicken from the proferred fork, eyes fierce as he stared at Blofeld. James frowned when he saw the broken weight of grief in Mallory's gaze. 

"You don't like chicken," Blofeld commented. "I catered to your preferences." 

For a moment, James feared that Mallory might choke on the food, but he swallowed. 

"What are you eating, Gareth?" Blofeld asked. A guard stood behind James, and he felt the serrated knife on his neck. 

Mallory's eyes was on James, terrified.

"What was his name?" Blofeld pressed. 

"Clarence," Mallory whispered, and James could see how Blofeld had won without a gun. 003. Clarence. 

"Very good," Blofeld praised, and speared another cube for him. 

James scanned the hall for vulnerabilities, for openings, forcing himself to compartmentalize his rage and fear. In the darkness of his focus, he knew that he had not feared for M so, that he had not feared for Vesper so. He could not grapple with that epiphany then. 

"Why Mr. Bond?" Blofeld asked, feeding Mallory again a cube of flesh. 

James could not fathom how Mallory chewed and swallowed and kept it down. Blofeld was likely playing mind games, and it was merely the flesh of an animal, but how were they to know? How could Mallory be so brave? There was unshakeable will in him, even when he submitted.

"Aldric," Blofeld said, when Mallory did not reply. A guard stepped forward to James and dragged a knife down his right cheek, eating into skin quarter of an inch deep. James did not shout or scream, but Mallory turned to Blofeld abruptly. 

"I didn't choose James," he replied. "He chose me."

"Did he now?" Blofeld asked gently. "Why do you think he chose you?" 

"I don't know."

Blofeld nodded to Aldric.   
  
"I am not lying," Mallory said sharply. "I can venture a guess. I was there. He was angry with me, for what happened to Mansfield. He wanted to make me pay. He realized that I was curious. It began so."

James hated every word of it. It was the truth, but it was not the entirety of the truth. James had wanted, even when he had been angry. James had admired, even when he had feared. He was glad for his smarting cheek, for the pain that anchored him.

"Very good," Blofeld praised. "I daresay that you are the bottom, the woman, the _hole_ in these dealings? Take a bite before you answer. I wouldn't want you famished." 

James shook his head fiercely at Mallory. He could take a knife's cut, a hundred cuts, inch by inch to his skin and flesh, to spare Mallory this.

Blofeld brought another cube to Mallory's mouth, watched him until he swallowed, a faint smile on his fat face. There was no embarrassment on Mallory's face. If James had spoken those obscene and degrading words to him, he would have flushed and protested, and still fallen easy into every kiss and caress James lavished on him. 

"James is a generous lover who understands my needs," Mallory said calmly, not an iota of self-consciousness on his mien as he held Blofeld's gaze. 

"And?" Blofeld gestured Aldric who cut a second stripe on James's cheek, scant a centimeter away from the first. 

"You are correct," Mallory said rapidly, worried and furious as he looked at James bleeding. "I am the bottom, the woman, the hole. I want what he wants from me, regardless of how taboo it may be." There was no emotion in his voice except care, and that care remained for James. 

Blofeld did not speak again, his beady eyes fixed on Mallory as he continued feeding him. When the plate was empty, he placed his fork to the side, clasped his fingers on his lap, and turned to James. 

"Would you mind us renewing our earlier discussion on the umbilicus? Gareth has a fascinating tale."

Mallory hesitated before he met James's gaze. The hesitation made James fear. 

"In New York, in the facility he had kept me, they had drugged me out of my senses. They put me in a padded cell and sent their surgeon to reconstruct my navel, to the shape that Blofeld wanted." 

"Your mother and you were connected there once. Now you are connected to me through the umbilicus I designed and wrought. After New York, you were mine, ruptured from her by the cord." Blofeld smiled at him kindly. "And to hear Mr. Bond say that your navel was featureless and unremarkable!"

The anger banked in Mallory's gaze could have set Agamnemon's fleet aflame. 

"I would like to view it now. I have never seen it while you were lucid. Go on. You don't want me to continuously threaten Mr. Bond, do you know?"

"No," Mallory replied, taking off his scarf and coat without fuss, one-handed. 

He draped them neatly over the back of the adjacent chair. James had helped him fasten the cufflinks. It was hard for him to accomplish their removal with a single hand. He looked up at Blofeld, who was waiting with a smile. 

"If you could, please?" 

"Not very difficult to ask, was it?" Blofeld remarked, and leaned to help him take the cufflinks off. Mallory needed assistance with the shirt as well. He had worn a belt instead of his customary braces, and James was glad for it, that he would not have to strip further. His skin was dotted by goosebumps. Blofeld ran a hand down his sternum to the navel he had wanted to see. 

"Stand up." 

Mallory stood up, hands at his sides, eyes on James as Blofeld placed his lips in a parody of parental affection on his navel. Blofeld reeled back then, furious, and backhanded Mallory with the full force of his fist, sending him flying to the floor. 

The guards stepped forward, guns aloft, but James rushed to put himself between Mallory and them, and threw the smoke grenade from Q. In the chaos, he disarmed the nearest guard and confiscated the weapon, whirling about to shoot them all. When there were only corpses before him, he listened to the sounds of the house. They had four minutes before the rest of the guards arrived, he estimated, as he placed the sounds to the architectural acoustics of the house he had studied on the way in.

Blofeld was swaying on his feet, struggling to breathe. James turned to shoot him, but Mallory grabbed his wrist to stave him off.

"He will die as I choose." 

He was carven of will as he spoke those words. James thought of how he had shot White, of how he had killed McKendall, of how he had tortured Denbigh. And he understood. Mallory had not wanted him to avenge M, to take her last mission. Why would he permit this then? Why would he allow James to avenge him, while he lived and breathed and had saved them both? Wait-

"What did you use?" James asked, frightened. Mallory must have applied it on his skin. How had he prevented exposure? _Had_ he prevented exposure? James felt his vision blacking at the edges, thinking of M and Vesper. 

"Tetrodotoxin," Mallory said, going for his coat and scarf, leaving aside his discarded shirt, dressing in haste.

Tetrodotoxin. Fucking Christ! 

"It is all right, James. I applied it over a skin barrier," Mallory said, nonchalant, watching Blofeld suffer and die. He smiled tiredly. "The course of human things, isn't it? No subversion is within the reach of even those who play God." 

The course of human things ended in death and loss. James drank in the sight of Mallory, alive, and did not know what to say. Outside, there were helicopters and explosions. 

"The expense reports are going to get me in trouble with the tribunal," Mallory said. 

He walked closer to stand over Blofeld, who lay struggling to breathe, diaphragm paralyzed. "I got the idea from you," he told Blofeld. "You favored Strychnine for the intermediaries you had tired of, I heard from the IRA. Denbigh nearly killed me with rodenticide." He watched carefully as Blofeld stilled, with one final gasping reach for air. "Never fear that you did not influence me." 

There was a bruise on his cheekbone where Blofeld had struck him. His gaze shifted from the corpse of his shadowy ghost of three decades, and turned to James, and he swore fervently. "You are bleeding." 

"Do you want an emetic pill?" James asked, operating on autopilot, refusing to think of the fucking death risk Mallory had taken to kill Blofeld. "I have been carrying them after Denbigh." 

"No," Mallory said, coming to James and leaning into him, placing his head on James's shoulder. The weight of him pressed close eased James's fears. "If it was Clarence, I have to be brave for him. He must have been, to his last breath. I owe him that, don't I?" 

James had no words to console either of them. The ceiling cracked then, and he hurried Mallory to the nearest alcove, diving behind suits of armor, leaning over Mallory to protect him from the mirrors that paned the walls as they shattered.

The ceiling gave in, raining plaster and brick, and Eve stepped out from the helicopter. 

"M!" She exclaimed, as she ran to him to help him up, her gun at the ready to defend. "James, take him and fly back," she ordered. "We will clean up here."

"Miss Moneypenny, 003-" Mallory began, but James and Eve rushed him to the copter, and James leapt in, hauling Mallory in, after him, just as blistering gunfire started raining down from the far corner of the dining hall. 

"James, we can't leave her here!" Mallory shouted, scrambling to the open door of the helicopter. James was not going to fucking risk Mallory diving before yet another capable woman for a stray bullet. He lifted off, even as they shot at the vessel, and Eve set off another explosion below with Q's latest gadgetry, before running away, no doubt to join the others where the MI6 forces had breached the mansion. 

James flew them along the coastline, until Mallory collected himself and joined him. First he fetched the first aid kit, to clean and dress the two lines on James's cheek. 

"It should not scar," he assessed, as if James fucking cared about that right then. 

Mallory did not comment on his silence, instead settling to read the charts to configure their course to the MI6 landing pad near Hampstead. Three hours, to where Tanner waited with Mallory's car. 

"Bill, Mr. Wentworth," Mallory greeted. 

"Welcome back, M," Tanner said warmly, opening the door for him. James slipped into the front seat, riding shotgun once again. 

"Eve sustained a flesh wound that they are treating in the field hospital at Dubrovnik. She is due to return to work day after tomorrow. She may also have mentioned something about chivalry and employment contracts." 

_No standard procedures_. Q had texted James. _Effective nonetheless_.

James did not reply. 

\---- 

When they entered Mallory's home in Kensington, James wanted to run to the liquor cabinets and pour himself one. His hands shook from the restraint he willed. 

"You have been quiet," Mallory said, locking the door behind them, after having bid the guards goodnight. There was horror on his features, poorly suppressed. He wanted to forget. James wanted to shake him until he understood why James was fucking frightened to death.   
  
"James?" Mallory asked, finally observing his companion's queer mood. "What is wrong?"

"Tetrodotoxin," James whispered. His hands would not stop shaking. "If he had touched you then, if he had kissed you, you would have _died_ , breathless and struggling, in minutes!" He was yelling, hating the shock on Mallory's face. He had promised that he would not hit Mallory again, but the rage in him demanded an outlet. "You could have died before me and I wouldn't have been able to save you, not with my life, not with his!"

"I was exceedingly careful when I grafted it onto the synthetic skin! I was careful to discard my vest and shirt afterwards," Mallory exclaimed. "I promised you that we would return."

"I could not have kept you safe when you walked there bathed in a drug that is lethal in minutes," James spat. "And I didn't fucking know."

"You exaggerate," Mallory began. "James, I was not going to go there without a plan, not when your life was at stake." 

James had gone there without a plan, except for hoping that Q came through with the attack as soon as there was an opening. Q had come through, sending Eve to fetch them from the dining room James had massacred the guards in. They would not have been there in time, had Mallory wound up contaminating himself with the drug by ingestion or touch. He needed to throw something at a wall. Everything in Mallory's house was either carefully selected or frightfully expensive, or both. 

"I am going home." 

"James!" Mallory hurried to him, and hesitated to touch him, seeing the mood he was in. How dared he fear James after everything, after walking bold to his death without telling James, with but a thin layer between skin and poison? 

"Don't leave me, please," Mallory said then quietly. "I can't stay alone tonight." James did not want him to beg for this. He had been so brave, eating what Blofeld had forced on him, answering every obscene and degrading question targeted to make a mockery of his heart. 

"You know why I cannot stay," James said, hating that his words affected Mallory so. 

He forced himself to not think of Vesper and M, of secrets they had kept from him, of how they had died for their fucking secrets at the end, leaving James impotent with their corpses in his arms. The rage in him was a broken beast, loud and loathing. 

Mallory shook his head, and came closer still. James fisted his palms and held them tight behind his back, afraid. He swore when Mallory dropped to his knees and placed his hands lax on James's thighs. 

"I don't want a blow job to smooth this over," James told him. "I just need time." 

Time to forget that Mallory had been prepared to die before James without even thinking to warn him. Blofeld had not had a pleasant death, but it had been fast, given his corpulence and weak lungs. Mallory would have died slower, and James would have had to hold him through it. 

"I was not intending to offer a blow job," Mallory whispered, looking up, eyes uncertain and smile wavering. "I know you are angry, James. Take it out on me. Only, don't leave tonight. I require you here."

"I will never strike you in anger again. I gave up the fucking drink for that," James reminded him, exhausted. 

"A deal? We are good at those, aren't we?" Mallory persuaded. "A deal for the night. Stay. Do what you want to me." 

There were dark circles about his eyes. There was still horror on his face, stark even amidst his confusion as to the source of James's anger. He did not deserve to be alone that night, not when he had finally stumbled out of the shadow which had hunted him for thirty years that he knew of, and paid a heavy price for it. Blofeld had been watching him from when he had been a mere boy of ten with a famous mother. James loved him for getting rid of his chains, with finality, with the lion's heart he had. James hated him, because one way or the other, Mallory would have ended the night liberating himself and killing Blofeld. Mallory had been willing to stake his own life on it. 

_In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,_  
_Like coarsest clothes against the cold:_  
_But that large grief which these enfold_  
_Is given in outline and no more._

Tennyson had his words. James would have been left with nothing. He was no man of words, to write and speak his grief to the world. He would have clung to Mallory's sheets until they lost the scent of the man who had slept on them once. What then? The drink? A suicide mission? Plain suicide? 

When Blofeld had fed Mallory, James had had the epiphany: he feared for Mallory more than he had feared for Vesper or M. 

"James, please," Mallory begged, clearly at a loss to understand the root of his fury, and needing James present as he processed the events of the day and the freedom he had not expected to have in his life. His eyes were tearful, as the delayed emotional responses began setting in. James could not leave him alone, it was clear. He would have to eat his fears and see to Mallory. He could give, this once, and it was the least Mallory deserved. All he had done, throughout their relationship, was take. 

"Go upstairs," James ordered. "Clean up. Wash off your bloody poison and neutralize it. I will join you in twenty minutes. Be on the bed, on your belly, naked. Mind your arm."

Mallory rose to his feet, and he wore his gratitude nakedly on his face as he looked at James, relieved. He hurried upstairs, perhaps worried that James might change his mind. 

The twenty minutes of reprieve from Mallory aided him to a place of relative calm. Mallory was not Vesper or M, he told himself. Mallory had kept secrets, but not to harm him. He had truly believed, James knew, that they would both return. He had spoken it with the assurance of a prophet. Vesper and M had been willing to die for their secrets. Mallory had kept his to ensure they lived. 

_I was not going to go there without a plan, not when your life was at stake_. Mallory had let Blofeld feed him that cruel meal when James's safety had been at stake. Mallory had answered Blofeld's tasteless questions when James's safety had been at stake. 

James thought wryly that he should be grateful that he had been there, for Blofeld to make Mallory obey. If Mallory had been with Blofeld alone, James knew that he would not have obeyed. He had been willing to play to Blofeld's whims and manipulate him for James. Blofeld had made his mistake in threatening James. 

Mallory was not cruel, and revenge was not his creed, but he would have moved heaven and earth for James. He had. 

James realized then, instinctively, that was the cause of Mallory's unmooring more than all the other cruelties that had fallen upon them that day; Mallory feared James's verdict of him. He was not looking to celebrate his freedom from Blofeld. He was looking to reaffirm that James would not leave him, after seeing the bare truth of him. How could he let James leave, when all he wanted was to hold James close, after having saved him, after having spent weeks in fear of James's life being collateral in what Blofeld wanted?

James did not want to throw a chair at the wall anymore. Nor did he fancy a drop of drink. His hands had stopped trembling and the dark violence he nursed would not demand that he take payment from Mallory's flesh. 

He moved to where Mallory's coat lay discarded over an armchair and got the cigarette case that Mallory stashed in its inner pocket. He filched a cigarette and smoked it down to the filter. Vesper had hated the taste and he had given it up for her, back then, and then he had fallen out of the habit afterwards. He glanced at the clock. Thirty-five minutes. Stubbing the cigarette out, he rushed up.

Mallory was as James had demanded, face pressed into the bed, goosebumps down his spine, nude and tense. When he heard James join him in the room, his body eased in a long sigh. 

"I lost track of time," James offered, sitting beside him, running a hand down his back to soothe. "Never, never do what you did downstairs. If I am angry, give me time. I won't be able to forgive myself if I touch you in rage." 

"You were going to leave," Mallory replied, choking on the words. His voice was thick with tears. How long had he lain there, silently weeping, frightened that James might have left after all? Mallory had a good sense for time. He must have known when the twenty minutes were up. James had left him, unwittingly, for another fifteen. 

"I needed to clear my head," James said. "I was frightened that I might harm you, by word or deed."

"We had a deal," Mallory muttered, implacable as ever. "I can take it."

"I don't need you to martyr yourself here, for me. You have me," James told him, wishing that he could cup his face and kiss him. "You have me."

Mallory shook his head, pressing his face into the sheets, refusing to look up. His hands were clenched into fists by his sides, as if he were restraining them from touching James. James pressed a warning palm to his injured arm, bidding him to relax. They had had the argument about wearing the sling in bed a few times. Mallory had won the battle. 

James stripped himself, knowing that words would serve him nothing then. He was not good at telling Mallory what he needed to hear, never had been. He would touch him and love him, in the language he knew best.

"Spread your legs," he said, tapping sharply on the back of a thigh. Mallory obeyed, reacting before his mind caught up. Good, James would keep him there a while, wring the worries out of him. 

"I want you to suck your fingers for me. Lave them well."

Mallory's breathing stuttered thin, but he obeyed, and the wet sounds of him made James press a cautionary hand to his own cock. 

"Bring your hand to your arse now. I want to see you stuffing yourself full." James bent to press a kiss to the nape of his neck. He was so warm there, and smelled of want and only of want. 

"You used the unscented soap." 

Mallory flushed from neck to shoulder blades. "I have noticed your preference," he said softly. As worried as he had been that James might leave, he had still found the wherewithal to give James something he was fond of, the raw scent of his skin unmasked by soap's fragrance. 

"While we are on the subject of my preferences," James said, teasing, "I enjoy you _au naturel_. I would not mind if you decreased the frequency of your grooming." He leaned between Mallory's legs and breathed over the curls of hair there, laughing when the legs spread wider instinctively. "Go on then. You seem to know what you need."

Mallory brought a long index finger and hesitated. 

"Gentle," James warned him, catching his finger and bringing it down to his hole. Mallory shuddered at the contact. "You are puffy from my cock yesterday." 

Mallory's gasp at his words told him everything he needed to know. 

"Must you watch?" He rasped, touching himself as James asked, breathing erratic as his finger caught on the sensitive edge of the rim. He was sore. James decided to monitor his comfort, not wanting him hurt, if he was carried away in the moment. 

"Why would I stop watching?" James shifted to place his cock against Mallory's calf, so that he could feel the physicality of what the sight was doing to James. Mallory's finger slipped in, and he stiffened head to toe in shock. 

"It is all right," James murmured, kissing where the finger entered, until Mallory relaxed once again. "You took my cock yesterday. You will be fine now. Stop holding your breath. Here, let me help you." He removed Mallory's finger and spread him wide open, to spit right into his hole. Mallory turned his face then, scandalized past words, and bewildered by his spike of arousal. The sight of him, hair in disarray, a shocked quirk to his mouth, eyes blazing, was enough. He cursed softly when he felt James's spend on his leg. 

"Well, let me scoop that into you," James offered, laughing. "Waste not, want not. Until we remember to purchase a bottle of lubricant, you will have to settle for my spit and spend to open you up." 

"The things you say!" Mallory exclaimed, but let James do as he pleased, let him scoop cooling spend and warm spit into him. 

"Fuck yourself now, on your finger," James said, settling between his thighs to watch. "Come for me like this."

"I don't think I can," Mallory said honestly, trying anyway, sticking his finger in and moving it in the same patterns James had done to prepare him the night before. He was unlikely to find his prostate, given the position and his limited reach. 

"Hump the bed, if you must, but you will come for me, just like this," James ordered, pressing suckling, biting kisses to where his arse met thigh. Mallory froze in mortification at the suggestion, before giving in, and his body took over his reasoning mind fast enough, trusting James implicitly, and when he finally approached orgasm, after nearly fifteen minutes of fucking himself, James drew his hand away and dragged a pillow underneath his hips to lift him up, and sucked his cock into his mouth. It was not the most comfortable position for a blow job. Fortunately, Mallory was far too gone to do anything but spend, hips humping the bed and arse gleaming open with James's spit and come. 

"Let me clean you up," James said, as they caught their breath. "Don't fall asleep yet." 

"Why are you angry with me?" Mallory asked, unusually lucid after orgasm. It must have been at the forefront of his mind. "What did I do?"

"I was frightened. Christ, you walked in there with one of the world's most lethal poisons on your skin but for a thin barrier. You could have died there, and I could have only watched. M made me an alcoholic. Vesper made me reckless with my life. You would have killed me. I don't think I'd have left that room any other way than in a bier to be buried beside you."

Mallory fell quiet at that. James shook his head and got out of bed to fetch a towel wet with warm water, and began cleaning up his lover of sweat and spit and spend. Mallory made a protesting noise when he dragged against the sensitive skin of his genitals and entrance. James gentled his touch. 

"It wasn't that I meant to die," Mallory said then.

"You were prepared to." 

"I was prepared to ensure that you did not die," Mallory replied, frustrated. "I couldn't have you affected by a madman who had a bone to pick with my mother. You saw what I was willing to do, to keep his hands off you."

Yes, James had seen, and he had no words to speak of how terrible and glorious the sight had been. _Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, who battled for the true, the just_ , James had no inclination towards religion or superstition, but there must have been something more than flesh and bone and consciousness in a creature as Mallory. _How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold_

"Blofeld's interest may have begun that way," James allowed. "His driving obsession had nothing to do with your mother, not since he first came across you in the SAS. He meant to have you for what you were, not for who your mother was." He dragged Mallory into arms, face to face. 

"The women I bedded before had not minded my cock, but they had minded the baggage. This is what that baggage means. I cannot let you keep secrets, not when it is about your life and death. Perhaps I might have taken it lightly, before Vesper and M. I am angry because I could have ended the night as I had at Skyfall, at Venice, with you dead in my arms because of a secret you had conveniently omitted."

"I meant to come back alive," Mallory said earnestly. 

"So had they."   
  
That shut him up. He watched James, pensive and silent, and then his eyes widened as he understood. 

"Denbigh told you to intervene, to force my hand to resign before the tribunal. You didn't, because you wanted me to choose, even if you feared that I would have to leave in disgrace, broken enough to eat a bullet or hang myself." Mallory shook his head as the epiphany struck finally. "You didn't want to choose for me, even when you did not agree with my decisions and feared the outcomes."

"It wasn't my place to decide," James confirmed softly. 

"And I chose for you today," Mallory nodded. Regret flashed across his features. "I understand now." He clasped James's hand to his breast, and said quietly, "I have little knowledge of what is expected in relationships, or of what you expect. I don't offer this as an excuse." He smiled, apologetic and pained at the grief he had caused. "I don't want you loving or fucking anyone else as long as I live. I would like to state that I am committed to applying my ingenuity of mind, my will, and my admittedly mediocre sexual offerings in whatever combination it takes to ensure that you stay." 

He had forgotten what had nailed James in this coffin. He had forgotten his heart. _The human-hearted man I love_ , as Tennyson had lamented. 

"I offered you my gun, a few weeks ago, not because I had any inclination towards offing myself, but because I didn't want to cause you worry," Mallory continued, picking his words with care. "I was worn out and my mind had room only for our survival yesterday. I did not mean to keep secrets." He looked at James with a promise in his gaze. "I shan't."

"I am sorry, James. I made a mistake. I regret the pain it caused you. Can you forgive me?" He offered his palm to James, in offering.  
  
M would have said something about standard procedures. James had never had anyone apologize to him before, in words. M had said something about getting one thing right, grudgingly. Vesper had stared at him, sad and dying, as she sunk. 

James had not apologized, in words, so frankly. He had tried to express his regrets and remorse as flowers on gravestones, as expensive gifts and saving lives. 

"James?"

"What am I to say?" James wondered, placing his hand in Mallory's, baffled by what his life had become with this strange, brave creature. Mallory seemed to immediately understand James's discomfort, because he smiled brightly and kissed him. 

"All right," James allowed. "I will forgive you. You can make it up to me by inviting your parents over for dinner."

"Must I?"

"I am afraid so. Christ, your mum texts me more than Q does. I am going to start demanding a salary; she has me on retainer to ask about her son's welfare." 

"That was my favorite rose," Mallory said then, voice soft. "Rose of Damascus. I have bled on that bush, fingers pricked by thorns when I carelessly knelt in the mud to smell the intense fragrance, to cup the bold, white bloom. As a boy, I dreamed of far-flung and exotic lands, in that hothouse where my mum grew roses. No place seemed farther away to my childish imagination than Damascus. I fancied myself Lawrence of Arabia." He cupped James's jaw and confessed, "I am embarrassed that when I read your record first, I envied you so for the places you have walked, and then I admired you as I had once admired Lawrence as a boy." 

"Heroes don't survive contact with familiarity, do they?" James asked, endeavoring to grapple with the thought of Mallory, of all men, reading his record and admiring him. 

"Familiarity did not cool my ardor," Mallory said, sincerity lambent in his gaze. 

"You were the man of the world that I had once dreamed to be as a boy. I wanted to prove myself to you. I did not have Mansfield's qualifications or experience. The summary of my military career was an early discharge following the tribunal recommendation considering my psychological assessment, with no medal or merit to my name." Mallory shrugged. "Your long career in our country's service made me feel inadequate. The documented trail of your sexual conquests made me feel impotent. You saved us at the hearing, when all I could do was take the shot meant for Mansfield, and I felt incompetent. I didn't think you would find me remarkable, not after everything you had done. After her death, I was afraid you would find me an encumbrance. I was..." He hesitated, before forging ahead. "You must understand that I am not an insecure man. However, I did consider the likelihood of your interest being rooted in my inheritance of Mansfield's position and the complex feelings that must have invoked."

He looked at a loss for words then. James did not want him to strip himself bare of his final shields. He offered, "You thought that I wanted you because I could demand your submission, and use it to show you your place; it did not matter what your title was, in the end I had you under my thumb." 

Mallory did not reply but he held James's gaze. 

"I cannot make amends for the past. You know this," James said quietly. "I don't know how to." 

"That is irrelevant now," Mallory replied, resolute. "Would you prefer that I met you as an equal, in this?" 

"You do," James said, tracing Mallory's hip. "Christ, you are the bravest creature that could be. Blofeld knew that. M knew that. I know that." 

He had thought about this subject before. Mallory did not have a reference for sexual partnerships. Where would he turn to? Porn? It had little of daily realism, of how to separate sex from the rest of it. Mallory's friends were those he had made over a career - how could he ask them about this? He had no siblings or family he was close to. He had no previous lovers or flirtations to consult. Tennyson lay on their bedside table, but James doubted plain answers could be found there. James was pisspoor at explaining anything of significance. There was nobody else Mallory could go to.

"You must excuse my phrasing," James cautioned, as he began. "We are sexually compatible. You are observant; you know that it takes me little more than the sight of your pleasure to get off."

"The roles we settled into," Mallory wondered softly, doubt coloring his tone. "I wonder if I am your gay mid-life crisis, a man you fuck." 

It was a mid-life crisis, certainly. James had been in crisis all his life. He suspected that Mallory too could claim the same. This was no different. 

"I don't want to fuck you because I fucked women. I want to fuck you because you fall apart in my arms as if I conquered Persia for you."

"You did obtain a rose of Damascus," Mallory teased him; a glimmer of ease had settled into his gaze at James's words nevertheless. James had also ordered sheets from Soufli, in a fit of impulse, wanting to celebrate should they return intact from Croatia. He would gift them later. 

"I think you are pondering over the wrong question," he told Mallory. "You are not concerned about my preferences. You are worried about yours. You are worried that you want to be fucked, that you might have a submissive streak."

"It wasn't expected, you understand," Mallory noted pensively. "I have been self-reliant to a fault, through my life. Apart from my academic years and the period in captivity, I have directed, not obeyed. It is deucedly hard to reconcile." A quirk lightened his face, as he continued. "My mid-life crisis, I suppose." 

"I don't think you have a submissive streak," James told him, brutally honest. "You have gone without another's care or touch for thirty years, give or take, years that were preceded by trauma of the sort even M's orphans were not trained to withstand. You were estranged from your family, unsure of your place in the world. You did not know what home meant, or who waited for you there. You learned to care for yourself - sheets from Soulfi and wines you enjoyed, furniture that appealed to you, clothes that you took comfort in, and a house well-kept." James watched the expressions flit across his lover's face, and said more kindly, "I don't think you expected to be touched or loved. It was not a grief that festered in your heart because you had not dared hold to or nurse the hope. Now you have this, and you are overwhelmed. Your responses to my touch are unsurprising; subconsciously, I suspect you are reacting to the long deprivation that ended in an abrupt manner. Your preferences may change. Try not to fret over them."

"What if they don't change?" 

"If they change, or if they don't, what does it matter now? I promised monogamy and you promised not to commit the bloody sin of Onan. We will muddle through, I imagine." 

Mallory had never hidden his fears from James. And yet, James had not seen him so vulnerable before - and he had seen him after their first night of grief and grudges, after their misunderstandings and fears, after Denbigh and McKendall and fucking Blofeld. 

James then realized it was easier when one chose to reveal themselves. How uncomfortable it was, to be revealed by another, to be known, to be seen before one had even known the heart of himself. He had hated Mallory for this once; for how Mallory had seen through him so clearly, at every turn and twist. 

It was a tragedy, James thought, that Mallory had not dared hope that he would be known in turn. Mallory had not dared hope that James would look and look and peel away sense and artifice to the raw core of him. 

"Do you remember, that first time, when you took your knife and ripped my shirt away?" 

"You were scared."

"Then you told me that you would not harm me."  
  
"And then you offered your throat in trust to an alcoholic bastard who bore a grudge. I would have called you an idiot if I hadn't been stupefied by the audacity of it." 

"I trusted you to cut my clothes off." Mallory kissed him. "You knew I was frightened then, even though I wanted to be touched. You know I am frightened now, even though I long to be seen. I trust you to peel me apart, to know me in the ways I have never learned myself." 

There it was, James thought. Forty-two years had brought him here, to finally ease a beloved's burden. 

"I have been reading." 

"Have you now?"

 _A man had given all other bliss,_  
_And all his worldly worth for this,_  
_To waste his whole heart in one kiss_  
  
Poetry did not suit his voice as it wrapped rich about Mallory's, but it was worth the mediocre recitation, to see the brightness on a dear face. 

"Sleep," he said, trading all other bliss and worth and dues for a kiss. 

He watched until Mallory woke in his arms in a new year.  
  
\----

  
"I need to get laid," Q informed James, as they played Call of Duty. Q was vicious that day, and James had resigned himself to dying at least ten times in their gaming. 

"Is that a new year resolution?"

"I am going to quit London, go to a small town, some shire or the other, get a wife. She'll have to put out every night and then I don't need to be sexually frustrated anymore."

"Times have changed," James pointed out. "Many of the beautiful ladies who slept with me were _not_ putting out for their husbands."

"I won't marry a pretty one," Q said, waving the objection away. "I'll pick one who can't attract even the milkman with a free blowjob." 

"I am beginning to see why Eve recommends the fleshlight as the best long term solution in your case." 

Their delivery arrived then. Q tripped over the wire of James's console as he leapt up to pay for the food. KFC today. Christ, the desk job and the junk food were not going to bode well for his blood pressure. How did Mallory keep his heartbeat at sixty after all these years of pencil-pushing? 

"Is M still binging on Nando's?" 

Blofeld had ruined that, among everything else he had ruined. They had left that out of the debrief - or at least James had. Enough of Mallory's life was in the government security intelligence archives. James refused to add anything else. 

"He has gone off them. Eve has gotten him hooked onto moon cakes now."

"That is not unhealthy enough, is it?" Q mused. "Moon cakes - sounds sophisticated. Kentucky Fucking Chicken, Bond." 

Mallory had gone off meat. Eve, who brought him lunch at work, had been baffled by his change in preferences. James suspected that a New Year's Resolution was the excuse offered. He wondered how long it would take before Eve sussed it out. 

James stopped by the local Guatemalan market every evening to pick up avocados and jackfruits and all manner of root vegetables, these days. If not for Youtube, he mused, his culinary adventures would have met a dire fate indeed. When cooking dinner, James often told Mallory tales of old, of travel to the countries where the produce had been imported from. Mallory drunk those stories in, greedy and curious. James had lived his boyhood dream, and perhaps he lived vicariously through those tales; it clearly could not be James's narrational abilities that kept him enthralled. 

"I took M's parents off MI6 surveillance," Q said, yawning, as he killed James yet again. 

James had nudged Mallory twice about inviting his parents. Knowing Mallory, he would need to be shoved outside his shell, than a gentle nudge in the direction. 

"How is he faring?" Q asked, finally getting to the kernel of his interrogation.

Fucking Q. If he was not as useful as he was, James would not have tolerated him. Q beamed at him, all-knowing and insouciant. James would never tell the prick that he was bloody fond of him. 

"He hasn't been traumatized," James said, putting the console away, and stretching his legs. 

"He has been seeing the in-house shrink."

"Stalker."

Mallory had spent an evening hemming and hawing about the subject, in great indecision. James had been bewildered, as he strove to understand what was required of him. 

In the end, Mallory had, frustratedly, said, "I think speaking to a therapist might help me make peace with the last few months. I am stressed because the last psychologist I openly spoke to carted me off to New York to a long-term psychiatric facility, and every single psychologist since has given me a diagnosis or two into the bargain."

"The MI6 psychologist cleared my evaluations though I failed the tests for three years running," James had pointed out. "I doubt they will write up reports of anything - they are all bloody loyal to you. If you need somebody to listen, start there." 

"Aren't you meant to offer an ear to listen to my woes?" Mallory had demanded querulously then. 

"I limit myself to catering vegetarian meals and sexual therapy," James had said, taking pleasure in how Mallory laughed.   


"What do you think?" Q demanded, nudging James in the thigh with his socked feet. 

"Mallory is fine. He usually is, you realize. Effervescence is one of his annoying qualities." 

"It would take a zombie apocalypse to shake him, if that," Q allowed. "Why do you call him Mallory? He has a first name, you know. I can look it up for you if you get me a girl."

"I am not putting my powers of seduction to such vile use," James demurred. "I am aware that he has a first name. A middle name too," he shuddered delicately, to Q's raucous laughter. 

"He calls you James." 

"I met him when he was Mallory. I am an old man, Q. It will take a long time to unlearn the name I once learned for him." Q flicked a chicken bone at him. "I had thought that it would help me stay detached, to preserve that semblance of distance," he admitted. Mallory had not called him out on that explicitly; then again, that was not Mallory's way. 

"Do you _ever_ call him by his given name?" 

"Let us go back to the fascinating subject of your incompetence at dating." 

\---- 

  
The MI6 held a memorial service for 003 in early February. Empty coffin. James wondered if it had rained that Easter, when Mallory's parents had buried an empty coffin.

"I had worked with him for thirteen years," Tanner said. 

"He bought me a scarf from Latvia," Eve mentioned, sad and burdened. She was wearing a scarf from Latvia. 

Q had not bothered to come. He said that funerals got in the way of his work to keep the rest of them alive. James would have to go to him later, with a beer or two, and fish and chips, for a wake. Q would not mourn, but he would grumble about all the times 003 had _not_ obeyed a command of his. 

Everyone else was there, and every face was touched by grief. Mallory, as the utter contradiction he was, was socializing, consoling with a word here, comforting with a pat to a wrist there. James suspected he was getting his time's worth out of the MI6 psychologist. Good. Mallory deserved peace in his head. James could not fight monsters for him there. He would gladly take on the McKendalls and the Blofelds of the world, not that Mallory had required saving, in the end. He had not solved the Blofeld problem using _standard procedures_ , as Q had told James over a text message that night. He had solved the problem nonetheless. It had won him friends in various security intelligence agencies, according to Felix - he had dismantled Nine Eyes without realizing the potency and momentum it had been gaining. Oblivious to the obvious, James thought fondly, as he watched Mallory be dragged by Eve to meet yet another MI6 personnel who wanted to shake his hand and wish him well.

Rumors had abounded that Mallory had been targeted by villainous and subversive elements in the government that were playing to the agenda of a foreign organization. After losing M, the MI6 rank and file were understandably displeased about the prospect of a second director dying at the rudder in the span of a mere few months. 

Another of the career MI6 servicemen, one that had preceded even M, came to Mallory, greeting him cordially, eyes sharp as they scanned his person for injuries or ill-health. Mallory, James suspected, had no inkling of the trust he had won. 

Mallory's father had once bragged about his son being a Prime Minister in the making - it had been more than parental hubris, James had to allow. In the Oxford summer, rowing down the river, in straw floaters and khakis, he must have larked about with his friends, making merry as they dreamed of the tomorrow stretched at their feet for conquest. 

It was time for the eulogy. Tanner held an umbrella over Mallory, as he had when they had interred M. 

_"I will not shut me from my kind,_  
_And, lest I stiffen into stone,_  
_I will not eat my heart alone,_  
_Nor feed with sighs a passing wind."_

Mallory's voice trembled in emotion, but he carried on. Onwards, ever onwards. A bold choice, but when had he chosen otherwise? It spoke of what Blofeld had done, and it noted that 003 was the first agent to be memorialized in the MI6. Ceremonies and acknowledgments, until Mallory's advent, had been reserved for the bureaucrats. Agents had been unnamed, unmourned, and buried unmarked in waste fields with no kin or fellow-soldier beside them. They had been merely the expedient instruments of a once-empire's power and reach. No more; Mallory was changing that. 

"This is the course of human things," Mallory said, closing out the eulogy. "That we dare, that we serve, that we die, and are mourned." 

There was pain, inchoate, in his mien then. He had feared that he would die unmourned, estranged from his family, living alone.   
  
\------  
  
"What do you think?" Tanner asked, spreading habanero over his toast. 

James could not abide the sight of this travesty, and returned his attention to where Q was teaching Eve to play beer pong. A lost cause. Neither of them could hold their drink, and they were giggling and burping as they strove to play. Suffer and abide, he supposed. 

"I think it is a terrible idea," Tanner said then, dragging him back to the subject. 

"Mallory buried an agent with ceremonial honors, despite a great deal of pressure from the Home Office," James reminded him. "Why underestimate him now?"

There was a discussion in the Whitehall wings about bringing the GCHQ into the MI6, claiming that cyber terrorism belonged naturally in the purview of the foreign intelligence service. The GCHQ had more personnel, outnumbering them four-fold. James had no idea how Mallory had convinced the powers that be to merge the GCHQ with the MI6, instead of the other way around. 

"You are addled," Tanner crowed. 

"Addled by anal!" Q exhibited his juvenile wit, and Eve was chortling as she smacked the back of his head. James did not rise to that bait. Forty-fucking-two; he had some restraint these days. 

"Well, what do you think?" He asked Q instead. 

"What does it matter?" Eve cut in. "I know the man better than any of you do! No, James, _anal_ does not qualify. Why doesn't anyone ask me what I think?" 

"You are just a secretary," Q teased. "You fetch him tea and send his clothes for dry-cleaning. I have a real job. Bill does too. Bond, horror of horrors, has a real job too that does not involve blowing things up!"

They needed to work on Q's flirting, lest some rightfully-offended woman shoot his head off. Right then, it was Eve, hands on her hips as she glared at him. 

"What do you think?" James asked her, aiming to defuse before she took the bloody shot. 

"He has been planning this for ages," she said, watching their faces of confusion and surprise with satisfaction. "Who do you think helped him plan? Cat got your tongue?"

"This cannot be!" Q exclaimed. "I track him everywhere! I know who he meets!" 

"Turns out, dear Q, sometimes a real job is not enough," she said sweetly, and sashayed down to Tanner. "How does it feel, Bill, to know that he trusted me more?"

"Come now," Tanner said, laughing, reluctantly impressed. "I think it wasn't about trust. You nagged him until he told you."

She scowled. 

"He cannot say no to a woman," Q noted, face tragic. "Aren't gay men supposed to know better?" 

James doubted Mallory was gay. They had not discussed the subject. James refused to. This was not his area - he would say something foolish and Mallory would be sexually confused for the rest of his life; Mallory could take it to his therapist who could probably explain it with weasel words and feel-good reassurances. 

"Why haven't you moved in yet?" Tanner asked James then, as they watched Q and Eve squabble. Q was taking the news hard; that Eve knew something before he did! 

Mallory had not asked James to move in. He doubted Mallory knew that was expected, for all that the man nattered on about the course of human things. James kept his flat - it made him feel safe and he refused to examine the reasons deeper. Somedays, when Mallory woke in his arms and silently watched him in adoration, James felt queasy, and he would turn tail and run to his flat as soon as Mallory became occupied with other matters. He would sit on his sofa bed, knees to chest, as he had as a boy in the little passage of the chapel when his parents had died, where he had stowed away M. Mallory had leveled Skyfall and James wondered if peat and bog covered it, turning it to earth. Mallory had leveled James too, and he struggled to find his footing often. He wanted to run away to Hanoi, or to return to the life of an agent, or, in the darkest of times, make Mallory fear him and spurn him. He did none of that; he made Mallory vegetarian fare and kissed him until he complained that he needed to breathe. 

"It is not his fault, you know," Tanner said wryly. "It is not his fault that you spent twenty years killing and running." He lowered his voice then. "I don't think he got the memo, of how this job means to be a lone sentinel for life."

Tanner was married to a woman who did not know where he worked. Q could not date. Eve tried to make the best of it, going through lovers as James once had. It was only here, in the low-ceilinged and cramped flat Eve kept in Croydon, amid second-hand furniture, with fast food and beer, that they could speak to another soul, truly, without cling film and masquerades. 

"Mansfield once said that her husband learned to cease asking questions, early in their marriage."

She had taken to his Tennyson, after his death. She had been a woman of heart, and she had had to place it aside, untended, until her husband had died and left her with poetry. The epiphany made James light-headed, and he felt Tanner's knowing gaze on him. She had cared, in excess, and it had been that care that had kept James safe for twenty years. It had been that care which had led the three of them, broken and dying, to Skyfall. Silva had seen it at the end, and he had been unable to kill her. James had not known. Nearly a year after Skyfall, the truth struck him like a meteor. Tanner's hand steadied him as he pulled James to Eve's sofa, and dumped him beside the Hello Kitty merchandise Eve had got from her latest boyfriend who was staging a valiant campaign to domesticate her. 

"Perhaps the MI6 has always needed those who could _feel_ at the helm. More so, I daresay, than in any other service. Other directors command men. Ours command machines used and expended for a cause that does not name or acknowledge them. The heart it takes to command machines, to make them love you to unflinchingly die for you in far flung places after a life at your bidding-" Tanner stopped speaking, overwhelmed. "They don't serve and die for Britannia, Bond." James had served M. 

"Mallory wears his heart on his sleeve. Mansfield was a woman in a man's world. She knew she could not afford the weakness." Tanner laughed then. "I don't think Mallory can afford it, myself. We shall just have to keep him safe." 

_Standard procedures_. How had James been so foolish as to believe her then? He had wanted to hate. He had wanted to see no truth but that she had used him and rid herself of him when he turned old and slow and unreliable. 

She had made many mistakes. And she had got one thing right. James had been caught up in his self-loathing and betrayal to notice. 

\----- 

"Plotting with Eve behind my back, are you?" He asked, when Mallory arrived home, at three in the morning on Friday. He had been restless in bed, tossing and turning, mulling over his conversation with Tanner. 

"She left at five today, claiming she had pressing social obligations. Wasn't she with you?" Mallory asked, yawning, navigating the room in the dark with ease. James could smell Courvoisier on his breath. He sat up and watched Mallory discard his clothes with little care. So this was how it went, James thought, amused. He got to his feet and padded after Mallory into the bathroom, leaning against the doorsill, watching Mallory brush. 

"James!" Mallory exclaimed then, blinking away sleep, as he stared at him in the mirror. "You are here." He was genuinely startled, James could tell, and his eyes were so bright in joy. Overwhelmed, James walked to him and looped his hands about Mallory's waist, pressing against the nude length of his lover's back. 

"I haven't bathed in eighteen hours," Mallory said, waving his toothbrush in apology. "Let me shower and join you in bed."

"Do you, usually?" James asked.

"Rarely. You show up on Friday afternoons at two. I wake up at one and shower then. There, now you have my dark secret." 

"Oh, it could be worse," James teased. "Come to bed." 

Mallory refused to. James did not want to argue at three in the morning. He let Mallory finish his ablutions, teasing him when he tried to shove James out the door so that he could piss in peace. After the shower, Mallory looked at him in consternation. 

"What now?" James wondered. "Don't tell me you have a powder room routine that must be undertaken in privacy." 

"I don't have a powder room," Mallory said, exasperated. "I usually shave and..." 

James could not resist him when he was bashful and annoyed. The combination suited him so. 

"Have you been douching yourself to lay out a feast for me?" James asked, laughing. 

Mallory stilled, in contemplation of this new knowledge. 

"I have read on the internet that gay men, who receive anal, prepare in this way," Mallory said thoughtfully. 

"Don't," James warned him, cutting him off. "Leave the sex to me, as I have told you often enough." 

He had known women obsessive about douching, giving themselves all manners of infections and pain from the practice. The vagina was a resilient organ and even it did not fare well with douching. He doubted anything good came of anal douching.

"Well, I haven't attempted it before," Mallory said thoughtfully. "Do you suppose it will enable us to have penetrative sex more often?"

"Are you complaining I don't fuck you enough?" 

Mallory glared at him. 

"I know from your records that you have fucked women more than once a day."

"You should stop snooping into my records." 

Mallory made a sound of frustration, and wrung his hands once, and asked him softly, "Are you satisfied, James?"

What did that therapist do, James thought grumpily, if explaining safe sex was still on his fucking plate? 

"You have _scars_ inside you, dearheart," James told him. Mallory scowled, as he did whenever James made sense. Bedlam. James's life was bedlam. "Daily penetrative sex is not advisable. I refuse to do you damage. You could fuck me, if penetration is what you are after."

Mallory shook his head abruptly. "I doubt I can sustain an erection to fuck you. I'd be too bloody anxious."

"You will get over it," James said kindly. "Nobody lasts long the first few times they are fucking." Christ, did Mallory think James was going to mock him for it? 

"I am not ready," Mallory muttered, running a hand through his fast receding hair. "You are very good at fucking. I would mentally compare myself to you throughout and end up making us both miserable."

Such blessed self-awareness. James wished sometimes that Mallory was _less_ self-aware. 

"Sit up on the counter," he asked, turning to fetch his razor and strop. "I can shave you tonight. You are half-asleep and would only nick yourself." 

"That is your razor," Mallory remarked, a soft smile quirking his mouth. He hauled himself up onto the counter and waited, nude, bathed, relaxed. "Nobody has shaved me before," he said, easy in giving up his secrets as none in James's life had been. "My mother wanted to, when I came home, with a beard tangled and six inches long. Her hands shook. It was my fault. I was frightened and shouted at her."

They had used a razor on him, to dig out his fingernails from the flesh. James pressed a kiss to his forehead. 

"Eve shaved me, when I went to Shanghai, before Skyfall," James said quietly, wanting to give. He foamed up the cream into a rich lather. His shaving cream, not Mallory's. It was unscented and functional. 

"I had a tremor then; coordination was shit after she shot me into the river. She was the first, and I trusted her." 

"She could return, if she wished," Mallory murmured, tilting his head into James's palm, shifting as James moved him. He inhaled sharply when James stepped in between his thighs. "She is wasted as my secretary."

"Clearly not, if she helped you plot your dastardly takeover of the GCHQ," James reminded him. He ran the lather down Mallory's right cheek, from bone to jaw, and held him still by a gentle clasp at the throat. Underneath his palm, his lover's Adam's apple lay fallow, trusting. 

Mallory was distracted, and in turn, distracting. James had to navigate how he smiled, his facial muscles shifting under the razor reckless. James had to navigate how he swallowed, as the razor ran down his jaw and chin and throat. 

"Keep at that and I will slit your throat," James warned him, and earned another smile into the bargain. 

It took twelve muscles, he had read somewhere, to smile. Zygomaticus, levator, risorius - he wound his razor carefully across the shifting tug and twist of them. Overwhelmed, he pressed his lips to the muscles Mallory used the most - orbicularis oculi, the crinkle at the corner of his eyes. James wondered if his lips were imprinted by them, by how frequently he had kissed those crinkles. At times, Mallory smiled in his sleep, and James wanted to howl into the night at what it had taken to bring him to safe-haven. 

Vesper, as Mallory, had smiled with her eyes. M had, as well; James had been too fucking spiteful to notice.

"Why did you take that bullet for her?" James asked, as he set the razor away. Not a nick. At times, his hand had tremors still when he shaved himself. His hand had not shaken once as he shaved Mallory.   
  
"Ulysses," Mallory murmured. He did not pretend to not know who James referred to. "What else could I have done?" He let James run a warm, wet towel about the freshly-shaven skin, nuzzling into James's palm, sleepy and content. His thighs, draped nude about James, tightened in an early spark of desire. He brought his hands to James's hips, to hold James tight within the span of his limbs. "I hesitate to speak of her to you," he said. "I did esteem her highly, from the first day when I met her, even though I was tasked with an investigation into her abuse of her position when it came to you."

"I realized today that she had cared, after all," James confessed, daubing a few drops of Mallory's aftershave onto his palm, and rubbing it into his lover's skin. 

The familiar scent grounded him; the temple of Solomon had smelled of frankincense, myrrh and cedar, he remembered. Curious, he picked up the bottle, and saw that it was unlabelled, and the maker's seal was in Hebrew. 

"She contacted me, after the shooting," Mallory said warily, watching James for his reactions. 

"That is why you came," James realized. 

"I would have come, regardless of her wishes," Mallory replied immediately. "Her wishes, however, constituted a factor in why I stayed at the MI6." 

Ulysses had left his land to Telemachus. 

_To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—_  
_Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil_  
_This labour, by slow prudence to make mild_  
_A rugged people, and through soft degrees_  
_Subdue them to the useful and the good._  
_Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere_

"They wanted me to lead the GCHQ, a larger organization, and one they claimed as more relevant in the times we live in. Why, they demanded, would I tar my name with a dead woman's dubious legacy?"

"Why?" James asked. He had not asked before. 

"It took me years to recover from Ireland, from Geneva, from New York. I saw glimpses of the same anxiety and questions of self-worth, of belonging, of crisis of faith, as I walked through the corridors of the MI6, after Skyfall. Resonance." Mallory smiled at him. "Does it matter now?"

"No," James allowed, kneeling before Mallory, parting his legs wide. "Do you want me to wreak the usual havoc of your electric groomer?" 

"How do you groom yourself?" Mallory asked, curious, and inhaled when James waved the straight razor before him. "Surely not! James! I am surprised you haven't sliced off a few inches from your cock!"

"The art of manliness, dearheart," James said, laughing at the silliness of it all. 

Mallory, despite his expressions of horror, let James take the razor to his genitals, and stayed relaxed and trusting as James trimmed his pubic hair. 

James had a fascination for grooming rituals. All his life, he had wanted to watch his lovers in their grooming. He had not mustered the courage to ask to be allowed to tend to them, before. Sex was easier to initiate than these intimacies. His composure slipped him, leaving him bare under Mallory's gaze, as he tended to his lover. 

"It isn't sexual," he confessed, before Mallory remarked on his state. 

"I can see that," Mallory said gently, and he let James be, giving himself over without ado to James's hands, fearing neither razor nor gaze.

When James got off his knees, and ran a warm towel over skin to soothe and clean, Mallory jerked awake. Oh, he had fallen into a doze. James closed his eyes to stave off a ruthless abandonment of composure. He let Mallory tug him into an embrace and buried his face in Mallory's neck, counting out his breaths to Mallory's steady heart. When he trusted himself to speak without sobbing, he urged Mallory up and to bed.

"Invite your parents," James demanded. 

"Hmm."

"You have forgiven them long ago."

Mallory did not reply. James knew what it was. 

"I haven't forgiven myself," Mallory admitted. "My father had a stroke in Geneva, when I slit my wrists. My mother...I had not seen her so broken, before or after. Every time she spoke to me over the phone, in New York, when I was high on whatever medications they pumped me with, after they had informed her of my latest failure to off myself, her voice was dull and soft, and I did not know what compelled her to call again. When I returned from New York, she told me that they wanted nothing to do with me."

"They don't have years left. Are you going to avoid them until you learn to forgive yourself?" James said brutally, knowing that the time to treat the matter with delicacy was long past them. "Make peace now, or you may not have a chance to."

\-----

Mallory called his father the next day. James kept an eye on him, though he was mostly distracted by his gaming with Q. 

"Tomorrow," Mallory said, coming to him as a man sentenced. He settled on the carpet, with his reading glasses and cricket magazine, and rested his head on James's leg, silent but for the occasional teasing comment when Q killed James on-screen yet again. 

"You waited here for me yesterday night," Mallory said, when James put away the console. 

Q had sulked and logged out when James finally slaughtered him _once_. Bloody child. 

"You gave me a key long ago," James said, bringing a hand to Mallory's hair to muss it up from its neat combover. It must be stress, James supposed. Mallory's parents, both, had a full head of hair.

James had not given Mallory a key to his flat. The rare occasions when Mallory came to him, he would wait by the door patiently until James arrived to let him in. Mallory had never once complained. 

"I shan't presume," Mallory said carefully. He flipped a page on Younis Khan's analysis of Australian test cricket. "Eve said I ought to ask." 

James did not reply. Mallory tilted his head to glance up, and frowned at what he saw. "Were you waiting for me to ask? James, you and I know I am bloody clueless when it comes to this."

"You got me a state-of-the-art gaming console that Q is bloody jealous of."

"That should have indicated my selfish preferences. I want you here. I didn't want you running to your flat on the weekends to play computer games with Q."

James hesitated, as he wondered how best to couch his fears without coming across as needy. Mallory put his magazine aside and shifted about, on his knees, hands coming to cup James's face, and he asked plainly, "Will you stay here with me? I don't want you to leave. I begged you to stay when we returned from Croatia, and I cried when you did not come to me after the twenty minutes you asked for. I force myself not to ask you to join me when I know I will return home on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays only to find you absent. I am told that clinginess is undesirable and unattractive."

"Cling all you like. Stop going to the internet for advice," James told him, tweaking his nose in admonishment. "Ask Eve. Christ knows she has the measure of us." 

Mallory grinned, boyish right then, with his hair in disarray and his clothes rumpled and his eyes full of unconcealed mirth despite his owlish reading glasses. "Stay, then, please." 

"Forty-fucking-two, and I have become domesticated," James lamented, and pulled Mallory up into his lap. "I mean to stay. You need a valet. Whoever heard of a man trimming his pubic hair with an _electric_ shaver?"

"Mean to teach me that the old ways are the best?" Mallory asked innocently, hands coming swift to James's groin, petting and fondling in interest. 

"Stop that or I will make you ride me." 

"Is that a threat?" Mallory queried. His lazy interest flared into scandal and need when James hauled him by the hips to dump him onto the calf-leather Chesterfield. He parted his legs in invitation, but James snapped him about, until he sat astride James's legs, facing the ornate Arabian mirror across the room. 

"James-"

James nipped at his neck and hushed him silent, efficiently stripping Mallory of dressing gown and shirt and vest, and then of trousers and pants, leaving him nude before the mirror. Mallory's head fell back on James's shoulder when James grabbed him by the inner thigh to spread him wide open. 

"Try to be quiet," James teased him. "We are not in your bedroom. I wouldn't want your guards to come tearing in, guns blazing, only to find that it is your virtue compromised."

"Virtue?" Mallory asked, laughing, embarrassed in tone and face and flushed skin. James ran a possessive cop over Mallory's chest, over the lone nipple that perked under his pinch. He fumbled in his jacket until he found the strips of lube he had carried around all morning. Mallory swore. 

"Eyes on the fucking mirror, dearheart," James ordered. "Watch all the obscene things you do when you are stuffed full of cock." He prepared Mallory effectively, briskly, paying no mind to the low remonstrances or half-stifled gasps his lover made. 

"I don't want my trousers stained," James warned him, taking his cock out, lifting Mallory up and guiding him onto it. "No mess on the sofa; we are having your parents over tomorrow." 

Mallory tensed about him, as James nudged him up and speared him down deeper. 

"Come on," James tapped his flanks as one would a horse. "Get to it. Eyes on the mirror or I will snap blinders on you." 

Mallory's toes skidded off James's house-slippers, struggling for purchase. His hands were white-knuckled on James's knees. His eyes were wild and his face flushed with exertion as he rode James as best as he could.

Biting his lips hard to stave off orgasm, James brought a lazy finger to trace the rim where his cock entered Mallory, and the sight of it made Mallory lose his pacing, what cadence of it he had been able to sustain. When James came in him, he fell back exhausted, not even able to muster the energy to get himself off.

"Trust me?" James asked, breathless. 

"I am dancing on your cock like a trout on a fishing line," Mallory said, laughing, a lovely splash of warm skin and clever mind given unto James for reasons unfathomable. "What could I possibly do to trust you more?"

James kissed him for his careless, honest words. 

_For what wert thou? some novel power_  
_Sprang up for ever at a touch,_  
_And hope could never hope too much_  
_In watching thee from hour to hour_

James had begun telling time by Mallory instead of his Omega wristwatch. Hour and day had lost meaning on the face of a watch.   
  
"James?"

"Clench. Don't stain anything," James warned him. "Torso flat over the dining table."

Mallory struggled to rise, as he tried to hold himself shut to spare James's clothes as bidden. James would never tire of watching him, of the little frowns of discomfort and mortification that flitted across his expressive face. 

James followed him to the table and pulled a chair between his legs. 

"Spread," he ordered. "And pass me my phone, please." 

"We can't!" 

James grabbed the phone, and opened his secure and illegal recorder. "I see you are hesitating. Let me help you." He lifted Mallory's legs, one by one, and placed him on his knees spread wide on the table, open and exposed to James's gaze. James placed a hand on Mallory's calf to soothe the trembling, in vain. 

"Come like this," he asked. When Mallory turned to look at him, horrified, James winked at him from between his legs. "Shall I spank you to help you along?"

"I don't know," Mallory replied, shutting his eyes tight, voice thin and wretched. 

James waited. 

"Yes," Mallory admitted, refusing to meet his gaze. "I want to try."

"You will like it," James promised him. "You are fucking predictable, you know." He flicked on the television in the sitting room. They could only see two-thirds of the screen from here. That sufficed. "I rigged a streaming connection from my phone," James told him. "You are going to come watching me spank you, until you can't hold yourself clenched to keep my spend in you. Watch yourself leak all over my hands, over the table."

James kept his promise. Mallory was gone at the first strike, stripped of reserve and words, unable to look away from the screen, as James filmed him being spanked. It was the eroticism that did him in, not the pain. James kept his hand light and soft, letting Mallory's imagination do the rest for him. His thighs were wet with James's spend, and when James saw him staggering at the cusp of release, intellect surrendered to sensuality, he leaned forward to press a suckling kiss to where Mallory's body opened. Mallory swore colorfully at the sight of it on the screen. James had to hold him up from crashing into the table as he came. 

"There you go," James said, kissing him thoroughly until he protested. "Do you think we can serve your mum tea right here tomorrow?" 

Mallory slapped him away, unable to restrain his mirth. A job well done, James noted in satisfaction, leaving his lover unspooled and unwound in the mess, whistling as he made his way to the kitchen to get started on dinner. As he began setting pots and pans out, he heard Mallory convincing the home assistance system to start playing ZZ Top's _Sharp Dressed Man_. 

\---- 

It was anticlimactic. 

Mallory took the bouquet of scarlet Lenten roses from his mother. 

"I shall set this in water," Mallory murmured, leaving his parents to James, cutting a swift retreat. 

Edith winked at James. Simon gave them both a warning glance and followed his son to the kitchen where he was puttering about with the flowers. 

"Behave," James told Edith. "I shan't stop him from throwing you out if you spook him." 

Her eyes were her son's, bright with mischief. James saw her to their Chesterfield, and took a silent moment to smugly remind himself of what he had done to her son right there. She picked up the cricket magazine Mallory had discarded earlier, and flicked through to Younis Khan's test cricket article. James suppressed a grin and went to rescue Mallory from his father. 

"Shall I help you?" Simon was asking, and then matching word to deed as he set out the tea-tray with saucers and cups. 

"I can manage tea," Mallory said quietly, watching the kettle as if it might grow a head out of its spout should he take his gaze off.

"Gareth."

James felt a twinge of pain at the sight. He had no father who would clasp him by the arm, and look at him as if he were proud of all that James was. 

"I am so sorry," Mallory whispered, closing his eyes, struggling for composure. "I hadn't-" He cleared his throat. "You must understand that I had not wanted to."

"I know now," Simon said softly, carefully, watching his son as if he might fade away swiftly into the ether. "James explained it all."

James turned away and walked back to Edith as Simon caught his son in a fierce embrace. He would never forget how shattered Mallory's face was, right then, as he saw himself forgiven. 

"I snooped around," Edith said, when he joined her on the sofa. "You are a serial womanizer."

"Were," James corrected her. "Get better at the snooping around, Edith." 

He began to see where Mallory's guilelessness when it came to women emerged from. Mallory spoiled Eve, and took bullets for M and Dowar. _Eighty percent chance of deep-seated childhood awe for a maternal figure_ , Q had stated. James had to hand it to the bloody child. No social graces whatsoever, and he was still fucking insightful into what made anyone tick. 

"It will be an early spring," she noted. "Perhaps a wedding under a trellis of Damascus roses." 

"No," he told her flatly. She looked up at him, heartbroken. "In a few years, perhaps. I have just only about started to come around to the idea of living together."

She smirked. James rolled his eyes at her manipulations.

"Why don't you first go and have a real conversation with him? You can scheme about his love life afterwards." 

Edith's smugness dropped, and he saw a mother, afraid. M had cared, he knew now, though she had died knowing that he had refused to see the truth of her heart's care for him. 

"You are as bad as him."

"He had to have inherited it from somewhere," she replied, with a wan smile. She looked up at him, hopeful.

"All on your own, I am afraid," James said, laughing. "Go on. I have done my part." 

He had done his part and enjoyed every moment of it. He had fucked her son on this selfsame sofa and then spanked him and eaten him out at the table they would have tea at. Mallory had been unable to string together a sentence for quite a while afterwards, far less worry about his reunion with his parents. 

Edith narrowed her eyes. "He was shy as a boy. I cannot imagine how he took to you. You are brawn and bravado, with a reputation for loving women and alcohol more than you ought to." 

"Are you going to question his tastes now?" 

"I worry," she admitted. "I didn't even know that he liked men."

"James is quite the catch, mum." 

Mallory, come to fetch them for tea, paused at the threshold, looked amused despite it all. 

"Oh, well, if you say so," Edith allowed, letting him chivvy her to the dining table, letting him pour her tea. "His sole skill seems to be sneaking in through the windows. He does not even reply to my texts for days, when he chooses to reply."

"He has travelled more than Lawrence of Arabia, and he owns a straight razor made of Damascus steel," Mallory offered. 

"That explains it, I suppose," Edith allowed, hiding her smile behind the teacup.

James glanced across at Simon, at the wistful fondness on his aged features. It must have been usual then, for them to banter so at tea and at dinner, while Simon had watched. 

"Do you have family hereabouts?" Simon asked him then. 

"None. All alone in the world, I am afraid," James answered, thinking of Skyfall, of the woman who had saved him as a boy and raised him to be worthy enough to be Mallory's.

"Not all alone, are you?" Mallory asked then.

James shook his head. Not all alone.

"May I remind you of the early spring and my trellis?" Edith suggested again.

Mallory looked between James and her, puzzled. 

"Your mother is worse than Eve," James informed him.

Mallory shrugged, as if asking what else might be new. 

Edith set her teacup down delicately on the saucer, steepled her hands to rest her chin upon them, looked at her son, with blazing frankness that James was used to seeing on Mallory's face. 

"I was frightened _for_ you. My husband nearly died, heartbroken, at what had become of you. We had discovered what it meant to be numb, after days and weeks and months and years of mourning you while you lived." Mallory held her gaze, letting her see the depths of his anguish and self-recrimination. "I made a mistake sending you away," she continued. "It was my decision and not your father's. He fought me on it then and every day since."

"You didn't know," Mallory offered hastily. 

"You forgive me?" 

"Long ago, in an instant." 

"And did you hate me for bringing Blofeld to notice you, to destroy you over three decades?" 

"Once," Mallory said, finally dropping his gaze. James wished he sat beside Mallory, to clasp his hand in comfort. "Once, when James was in Croatia, and I feared for his life." He looked up again at his mother, in understanding. "You regretted me once, when your husband's life was in peril because of my actions." 

"I did not regret you. I hated myself, for what my hubris had done to you. I was witless with worry. I tried to keep us alive, even if apart. Let him live, I thought, even if he cannot forgive me."

James looked away from the sharp anguish on Mallory's face upon hearing his mother's words. 

"That is long behind us," Simon interceded. "I did not fault you for any of it then, or in the years that followed, Gareth. I have helped you when you allowed me to, when you returned to your career."

"I wouldn't have had a career without you pressing your friends in high places," Mallory muttered, grateful and yet not.

"You would," James cut in. "You took the MI6 and made it yours without an iota of support. Your father didn't help you because you needed it. He helped you because he wanted to." 

"James is right. I stepped in because you were my son, not because you needed me. Why would you think anything else?" Simon wondered. "You were always a resilient boy. You would have persevered and prevailed."

Mallory nodded shakily. 

"So this is what you see in our Mr. Bond," Edith noted. "He does know you."

"Root and all, all in all," Mallory confessed, using the same words James had spoken to him once of a flower in the crannied wall. 

Bravely, he offered his palm to his mother. She smiled and took his hand in hers, and stepped forward to press a soft kiss to his knuckles. He made a soft sound of hurt, but held her eyes as she came to stand beside him.

"I threw a vase at you, when you brought flowers to my hospital bed in Geneva," he murmured, heartbroken. 

"Shoddy aim," she teased him, enfolding him in her arms, her eyes bright on him as he pressed his head into her stomach, a boy seeking his mother's warmth. 

The umbilicus, Blofeld had said, was the physical, incontrovertible truth of a mother and her child. He had subverted it, had hewn it anew for Mallory, cutting off his tether to his mother, to the young woman who had in hubris stood underneath her trellis of Damascus roses and wanted greatness for her son. James looked away from the sight, pained, feeling as if he were an intruder in something sacrosanct. 

\----

Later, as James saw them out, she turned back and reminded him, "It will be an early spring." She softened then, and said, "Don't mind me. He hasn't been happier in his life. You mended what remained of him after my hubris cast him into Blofeld's path."

He had not mended anything. Mallory had not required saving. His father understood that. James understood that. 

James shut the door behind her. She had got one thing right, in the end, just as M had. It sufficed.   
  
\----- 

Eve barged into James's office and plonked herself down in his visitor's chair. 

"It is bloody uncomfortable."

"Complain to Tanner. I have, frequently, and he has done nothing about it," James told her, looking up from their latest compilations of Kurdish intelligence on his computer. 

"I am throwing a birthday party for M at my flat, tonight," she informed him. 

"Does he know?"

"That is your problem. Get him there at seven, please." 

"Or?" 

"Or I will take the bloody shot," she sassed, and James was glad that she could joke about it without horror in her eyes. Perhaps one day she could leave Mallory's side and make something greater of herself. 

"I am _fine_ ," she protested, knowing the direction of his thoughts. "I am fine where I am." 

James thought of Edith and her wish for a newborn babe. Perhaps Eve was fine where she was. Why would he wish on her the life he had had for twenty years, before Skyfall had swept him home? Eve, as Q had once pointed out, could not compartmentalize as easily as M or James or Q could. 

"We will be there," James told her. "He came back from work at five in the morning. Don't blame me if he falls asleep."

Edith and Simon had stopped by, at noon, and James had had to wake him for a hasty lunch together. To his credit, Mallory had rallied well and responded warmly to his parents' wishes for his birthday, and taken their lamentations for his utter lack of presentability at midday with good humor. 

"No birthday sex?" Eve asked, aghast. "You are failing in your spousal duties to my boss!"

James spat out his tea over his keyboard and glared at her cackling. 

"M would have had your guts for garters, if you were so impertinent in her presence."

"M, both her and him, knew to suffer and abide." 

Eve smiled at James, and looked at the bulldog on his desk, and they were thinking of the verses that Mansfield had recited at the tribunal, of one equal temper of heroic hearts that had saved the MI6, one by dying and the other by living. 

_Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name_  
_For what is one, the first, the last,_  
_Thou, like my present and my past,_  
_Thy place is changed; thou art the same._

M was M, whether M was Mansfield or Mallory, the first and the last. 

\-----   
  
"On time!" Tanner exclaimed, opening the door for them.

Eve came to take Mallory's coat, waving off his protestations, and James left them to it. Q was in the kitchen, fiddling with the oven controls, face scrunched in concentration. 

"Did you bake in Eve's kitchen?" James asked, horrified. "Does the oven even work?"

Eve was not known for her culinary adventures. Her boyfriends kept her in takeaway. 

"I had to fix it first," Q allowed. "The cake would have smushed if I had brought it along from mine. It had to be baked here."

James feared what artistic expression they would have to humor. Q winked at him. 

"James! Fetch the plates!" Eve shouted. "Takeaway is here." 

He left Q to the oven and set about fetching plates and napkins. He winced at the smell of peri-peri chicken. 

"It is quite all right," Mallory was saying, as Eve and Tanner apologized. 

Q. Fucking Q. Q must have ordered takeaway. He had suspected something was amiss for a long while. Just like the bloody child to force the issue. Mallory noticed James's rage, because he shook his head in warning, and stepped past him into the kitchen, to speak with Q. James did not hear what they spoke of.

"Let him be," Mallory advised, when he came back to join them in Eve's den. 

He handed Tanner the hot sauce bottle he had fetched from the kitchen, took the opened bottle of Guinness Eve offered, and set about distracting James with how he drank straight, betraying every sign of a man unused to it.

"I can get you a glass," James told him, teasing. "You needn't slum it with the rest of us." 

"I don't mind," Mallory said sincerely. 

He reached for the bucket of garlicky wings, grinned at James, and took one and brought it to James's mouth. 

"You are worse than Q," James muttered, taking a bite, watching Mallory carefully for any sign of discomfort or trauma. All he received was a bright grin and Mallory stealing the rest of the wing, getting oil and spice over his mouth and fingers, incompetent at navigating food without silverware. James brought a napkin to clean him off. 

Q's cake was a giant cock that stood upright, in defiance of gravity. 

"Coq du Eiffel!" Q announced in terrible French. 

His eyes were red and he hesitated to meet James's eyes after the Nando's stunt he had pulled off, but he put on a brave face. James forgave the idiot child. He had been just trying to help. 

"Where am I to stick the candle?" Eve exclaimed, in outraged amusement. 

"In the slit," Q suggested. 

"Between the balls," Tanner opined. "Symmetry and balance are important." 

Mallory took it all in good sport, even when Eve stuck the candle deep into the cock of cream and crust. He bent to blow out the candle, licked up a swipe of meringue, much to Q's raucous cheering and Eve's giggling and Tanner's whoop of scandal, and came to kiss James with a mouth full of cream. 

It tasted delicious, of Q's bloody brilliant baking and of Mallory's sweet victory. 

James dared hold him close for a second, before others, before letting him go. Mallory had never minded being known. James had, fretful that knowing would lead to harm, to betrayal, to _loss_. 

" _If you cock it up, I will fix it. I always do_ ," Q had promised him, when James had turned to him before Croatia. Eve had thrown James a birthday party, the first of his life. Tanner had seen him for twenty years, and forgiven him White and Denbigh and McKendall. 

Eve passed the champagne around. Ruinart, prestige cuvée. James raised his eyebrows at Tanner for catering to Mallory's snobbery, and Tanner shrugged in innocence. James received his usual flute of sparkling water. Mallory may have had the courage to eat peri-peri chicken again. James refused to even contemplate a sip of champagne, remorse still a wounded beast in him as he remembered the cruel and faithless man he had been. 

"To M!" Tanner cheered. 

"To many years of conspiracies together," Eve said, cackling at the face Q pulled. 

"To keeping you alive," Q said smartly. "Even when you leap before perfectly capable women to take a stray bullet or two, even when you forget to tell me that you have been hunted by a madman for thirty years, even when you persist in dismantling my cameras in your home."

"Sparing you blushes," James replied, grinning. "We know you aren't getting any. Why would we rub it in your face?"

"Nobody rubs anything in my face!" Q lamented. "Eve, how do I get women to rub their bushes in my face?" Eve spat out the prestige cuvee and turned to rip him a new one. 

James clinked his flute to Mallory's, as they stood surrounded by friends and _known_. 

"What shall we toast to?" Mallory wondered, light and carefree. 

James meant to unsettle him. He leaned in and whispered, "To you fucking me tonight." 

That did the job. Mallory's eyes were so wide in anxiety and anticipation. Good. Let him dwell on that for a while. James went to help Tanner pry Eve and Q apart before they murdered each other with forks. 

\---- 

James had laid out the new sheets from Soufli. 

"They are not white," Mallory remarked, when he stepped across the threshold. 

"A thank you is customary," James teased him, but Mallory had gone speechless, at the sight of the pale pink-white-red hued petals of the Damascene roses that marked the bed. Roses of the princes. 

"I stole them from your mother's garden earlier today." 

"She would have gladly given them to you."

Not without fucking going on about what exactly James ought to do underneath her fucking trellis. 

"They will stain the sheets," Mallory warned him softly, but his eyes were desiring in the candlelight. 

"If I want to be fucked on roses, I bloody well will be," James rejoined, dragging him in, kissing him properly, and pouring him onto the sheets. 

"Your eyes," James offered. "The sheets matched your eyes."

"They don't dye their sheets," Mallory said, astounded, touched and flattered by James's comment, smiling awkwardly as he realized he did not know how to respond.

"A custom job," James said cheerfully, watching him flounder. Mallory's eyes were soft and lambent, and the sheets brought out the sparkle in their depths. "I can be very persuasive."

They fucked on a bed of petals James had stolen from a garden leaving winter. Spring was early, James thought, as he sat astride Mallory, as he clutched tight at Mallory's shoulders, riding him hard and fierce, wanting, wanting, _wanting_. Mallory had had enough after a few minutes of this desperation. 

"You will hurt yourself," he chided, caught up in care even when he was aroused by James's desperation. He turned them about, smiling in gratitude when James let him.

 _Missionary_. The women who had pegged him before had not taken him like this, face to face, flesh to flesh, heart over heart, palms clasped in his own. 

Mallory set about his task with his customary incisive application of his damned observational skills, watching every twist and turn of James's face and body. When he began fucking James in earnest, James could only gasp and hang on for dear life, as Mallory flayed him apart, apiece, asunder, with how he bent to drag his teeth sharp down James's throat, with how he held James down unflinching and unyielding through it all. He knew how James was unable to resist the sight of his pleasure, and he made his pleasure known vocally.

"I wanted this. I wanted you. I wanted you from when you walked into that tribunal, true and valorous. I wanted you when you struck me at Skyfall and yet let me cling to you through the storm. I wanted you when you came back from Portlaoise and let me hold you as you wept. I wanted you when I saw the fury in your gaze as you stood over Blofeld and yet stayed your hand at my judgement." Mallory's words fell away, but his eyes glistened as he looked down. "I was content to be spellbound by you, from afar, to have saved you from yourself. You shocked me, when you came demanding everything else. _Have it_ , I thought then, _have it all_. Who but you?" 

He came then, and his agonized rictus of pleasure made James spend too. _Missionary_ , James thought dimly, over the roar of blood in his ears, as he lay offered up to Mallory to be kissed and owned.   
  
James rose to an elbow as Mallory lay beside him, in satiated exhaustion. What a peculiar and beloved thing James beheld, amidst sheets of azure silk and petals of Damascus, gleaming in the sweat of their lovemaking, wearing only James's marks of teeth and nails and grip on him. 

"I have loved you through it all," Mallory confessed, looking up at him as if James were a hero returned home.

Mallory had known the bent of his heart from the beginning, and surrendered in grace. James had blundered into his fate unknowing, railing against the inevitability of it. 

What did it matter how they had sailed home, through storm and peril? _Nostos_ was a war-weary seafarer's journey home, only to find nothing the same. This rose-littered bed was not the seaside by Abruzzo where James had once dreamed he might make love to Vesper. Mallory had never dared aspire to another's care.

This was not the home they had known to dream of, and yet, here they were, in a bower of two wrought of their will and want, whittled clean by the course of human things. 

_Known and unknown; human, divine_  
_Sweet human hand and lips and eye_  
_Dear heavenly friend that canst not die_  
_Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine_

"Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine," James declared, dragging a finger to chase and brush the edges of Mallory's bright smile. 

"Have it. Have it all," Mallory offered. "Who but you?"

James kissed Mallory's chest to seal their covenant of _nostos_ , laying his fealty upon that brave-beating heart.

\------ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, for trusting me to sail us home. 
> 
> I hope this brought you a moment of distraction in weird and worrisome times. Keep it, share it, write to me, if you wish. 
> 
> A measly gift from me, to you, with my love.  
> Take care. Stay safe.


End file.
